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, in an updated eighteenth-century novel featuring Native Americans and frontier folk, ripped bodices, naval warfare, conspiracies erotic and political and 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-Revoluntionary America and back, through the stange 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: Historical, Literature, American, 20th Century, Classics, Literary Fiction, Novels, Historical Fiction, Fiction, The United States Of America
ratings_count: 10987
awards: awardedAt: 852105600000
name: The New York Times Best Book of the Year, awardedAt: 852105600000
name: Time Magazine Best Book of the Year
publisher: Vintage Books