Thomas Pynchon

Birth : 1937-05-08, Long Island, New York, USA

History

Thomas Ruggles Pynchon Jr. is an American author/writer. Upon graduation from CU., Pynchon had many options including teaching creative writing at Cornell, becoming a disk jockey, or a film critic for Esquire. "Gravity's Rainbow" was published in 1973. The year after it shared the National Book Award for fiction with Isaac Bashevis Singer's "A Crown of Feathers". It was also unanimously selected by the judges for the Pulitzer Prize in literature, but the selection was overruled by the Pulitzer advisory board whose members called it "unreadable," "turgid," "overwritten," and "obscene."

Movies

Chryskylodon Blues

Writer

On the set of Paul Thomas Anderson's Inherent Vice.

Inherent Vice

Novel

In Los Angeles at the turn of the 1970s, drug-fueled detective Larry "Doc" Sportello investigates the disappearance of an ex-girlfriend.

Impolex

Writer

Impolex tells the story of Tyrone S., a United States soldier in Operation Paperclip, the mission to locate and retrieve German rockets and rocket science after the end of World War II. Tyrone is tasked with finding what he believes are the last V-2’s. Lost in the woods of an undefined European country, people from Tyrone’s past begin to appear in unusual ways, bearing strange tidings. A loved one he abandoned for the war is especially prominent in Tyrone’s journey, as is a fellow soldier and a mysterious man with tidings of the present and the future that are not yet known to Tyrone.

Thomas Pynchon: A Journey Into the Mind of P.

Writer

Thomas Pynchon is a best-selling American novelist, who, unlike the vast majority of his peers, has eschewed the limelight with near-fanatical determination since the 1960s. This film compiles testimonies and evidence culled from Pynchon's fans and colleagues, investigating the enigmatic writer's background and speculating on his motivations.

Prüfstand VII

Novel

Prüfstand VII is a 2002 German docudrama film directed by Robert Bramkamp, about the V2 rocket and the rocket research in the Peenemünde Army Research Center. The film deals with the history of ideas surrounding the rocket research and the conquest of space, with Bianca as the spirit of the rocket guiding the viewer around different aspects of rocket research. It is partly inspired by Thomas Pynchon's novel Gravity's Rainbow and features dramatization of some selected scenes from the novel.

Vineland

Novel

Vineland, a zone of blessed anarchy in northern California, is the last refuge of hippiedom, a culture devastated by the sobriety epidemic, Reaganomics, and the Tube. Here, in an Orwellian 1984, Zoyd Wheeler and his daughter Prairie search for Prairie's long-lost mother, a Sixties radical who ran off with a narc.