Gravity's Rainbow received very positive reviews in the press and among academic critics, although some critics have maintained that the novel is incomprehensible. Edward Mendelson (quoted in John Stark's Dictionary of Literary Biography entry on Pynchon) writes, “few books in this century have achieved the range and depth of this one. . . . This is certainly the most important novel to be published in English in the past thirty years.” In his influential 1973 essay “Rocket Power,” Richard Poirier stresses Pynchon's historical importance and argues that the book is “a profound (and profoundly funny) historical meditation on the humanity sacrificed to a grotesque delusion—the Faustian illusion of the inequality of lives and the inequality of the nature of signs.” The novel was disqualified from winning the Pulitzer Prize because the advisory board deemed it unreadable and obscene, but it won the National Book Award in 1974.

Subsequent criticism has...