Volume 44, Number 10 · June 12, 1997
Entropology
By Louis Menand
Mason & Dixon
by Thomas Pynchon
Henry Holt, 773 pp., $27.50
Thomas Pynchon is the unlikely offspring of Jack Kerouac and the Cornell English department. He was born in Glen Cove, Long Island, in 1937. He attended Oyster Bay High School, and entered Cornell in 1953, majoring in engineering physics before switching to English. In 1955, he left college to serve for two years in the Navy. He was stationed, for part of that time, in Norfolk, Virginia, where he one day wandered into a bookstore and picked up a copy of the Evergreen Review. It was his first exposure to the Beat sensibility—'an eye-opener,' as he later described it.[1] He returned to Cornell in 1957, took a literature course with Vladimir Nabokov (who, when asked about it years later, did not remember him), and graduated in 1959.
Review, 4337 words
To read the full text of this piece, please choose one of the following options:
|
If you are already a subscriber to the Review's electronic edition, please sign in: |
To subscribe to the electronic edition, please press the button below. |
To purchase access to this article for $3, please press the button below. |