This is a comprehensive study of the most influential figure in postwar American literature. Over a writing career spanning more than fifty years, Thomas Pynchon has been at the forefront of America's engagement with postmodern literary possibilities. Famously elusive, he is nevertheless central to any understanding of the story that the nation tells about itself and its relationship to the wider world. Pynchon's fiction is at once encyclopedic and devastatingly satirical, formally experimental and acutely political. It ranges across a wide span of historical moments - pre-revolutionary...