page_title: Thomas Pynchon
section_title: Early life
hierarchical_section_title: Thomas Pynchon / Early life
caption_attribution_description: English: High school senior of American author Thomas Pynchon, age 16, from the 1953 Oyster Bay High School yearbook. The caption reads: Pynchon, Thomas "Pynch"; P &amp; G [Purple &amp; Gold, the school’s student newspaper]; Yearbook; Trade Fair 2, 3, 4; Sr. Play student director; Spanish Club 3, 4; Honor Society 3, 4; likes pizza; dislikes hypocrites; pet possession, a type- writer; aspires to be a physicist.
context_page_description: Thomas Ruggles Pynchon Jr. is an American novelist. A MacArthur Fellow, he is noted for his dense and complex novels. His fiction and non-fiction writings encompass a vast array of subject matter, genres and themes, including history, music, science, and mathematics. For Gravity's Rainbow, Pynchon won the 1973 U.S. National Book Award for Fiction.
  Hailing from Long Island, Pynchon served two years in the United States Navy and earned an English degree from Cornell University. After publishing several short stories in the late 1950s and early 1960s, he began composing the novels for which he is best known: V., The Crying of Lot 49, and Gravity's Rainbow. His 2009 novel Inherent Vice was adapted into a feature film of the same name by director Paul Thomas Anderson in 2014. Pynchon is notoriously reclusive; few photographs of him have been published, and rumors about his location and identity have circulated since the 1960s. Pynchon's most recent novel, Bleeding Edge, was published on September 17, 2013.
context_section_description: Thomas Pynchon was born on May 8, 1937, in Glen Cove, Long Island, New York, one of three children of engineer and politician Thomas Ruggles Pynchon Sr. (1907–1995) and Katherine Frances Bennett (1909–1996), a nurse. His earliest American ancestor, William Pynchon, emigrated to the Massachusetts Bay Colony with the Winthrop Fleet in 1630, then became the founder of Springfield, Massachusetts, in 1636, and thereafter a long line of Pynchon descendants found wealth and repute on American soil. Aspects of Pynchon's ancestry and family background have partially inspired his fiction writing, particularly in the Slothrop family histories related in the short story "The Secret Integration" (1964) and Gravity's Rainbow (1973). During his childhood, Pynchon alternatively attended Episcopal services with his father and Roman Catholic services with his mother. A "voracious reader and precocious writer," Pynchon is believed to have skipped two grades before high school.
caption: Pynchon at age 16 in his high school senior portrait
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