Though a difficult literary author who has written only five novels in 35 years, Thomas Pynchon has remained a figure who has captured the imagination of a wider public and has avoided the academic and literary communities who revere him. His use of popular culture in his fiction, along with other such "unliterary" subjects as science, have had a highly influential effect on modern fiction. Pynchon, however, is also known to many who have never read his work as an author who has maintained an unheard of level of anonymity in a society that thrives on self-promotion.

Thomas Pynchon was born on May 8, 1937 in Glen Cove, Long Island, New York, into a prosperous family with an American heritage dating back to the early seventeenth century. He studied at Cornell University, served a two-year stint in the Navy, and worked in Seattle for Boeing Aircraft Corporation...