num_pages: 773
description: Charles Mason (1728-1786) and Jeremiah Dixon (1733-1779) were the British surveyors best remembered for running the boundary between Pennsylvania and Maryland that we know today as the Mason-Dixon Line. Here is their story as re-imagined by Thomas Pynchon, featuring Native Americans and frontier folk, ripped bodices, naval warfare, conspiracies erotic and political, major caffeine abuse. We follow the mismatch'd pair—one rollicking, the other depressive; one Gothic, the other pre-Romantic—from their first journey together to the Cape of Good Hope, to pre-Revolutionary America and back, through the strange yet redemptive turns of fortune in their later lives, on a grand tour of the Enlightenment's dark hemisphere, as they observe and participate in the many opportunities for insanity presented them by the Age of Reason.
language: English
title: Mason & Dixon
titlecomplete: Mason & Dixon
characters: Charles Mason, Jeremiah Dixon
genres: 20th Century, American, Historical Fiction, Historical, Literary Fiction, Novels, Literature, Classics, The United States Of America, Fiction
ratings_count: 10983
awards: awardedAt: 852105600000
name: The New York Times Best Book of the Year, awardedAt: 852105600000
name: Time Magazine Best Book of the Year
publisher: Picador USA