Thomas Pynchon 's ancestral roots go deep into the soil of America--an appropriate genealogy for a writer whose overriding concern in his fictional project is the construction of "America" and the necessary conditions for living within that construction. The first Pynchon in the New World was William Pynchon, who arrived in 1630. As Mathew Winston was among the first to point out, William "was a patentee and treasurer of the Massachusetts Bay Colony and a founder both of Roxbury and of Springfield." Besides being one of the early Puritan settlers of colonial New England, William was the first Pynchon to become an author, writing a tract called The Meritorious Price of Our Redemption (1650), which was judged heretical because it challenged the tenets of "Election" (the Puritan belief that the salvation or damnation of each individual was predetermined) that upheld American Puritan theology and social organization. The tract was banned...