Gravity's Rainbow
28 February 1973
Four years after Pynchon signed a contract with Viking (promising to deliver a novel the same year in December) Gravity's Rainbow is published. When the manuscript finally arrived at Corlies Smith's desk at Viking, the brief description stated it was a "free-swinging, wide-ranging story of numerous far-out characters in England and Europe at the end of World War II and immediately after-most of them haunted by the V-2 rocket bomb." [1]The novel was awarded the National Book Award in 1974, was denied the Pulitzer Prize, and Thomas Pynchon declined the William Dean Howells Medal for it in 1975.
"Pynchon is the devil who went beyond the grave to anatomize the remains of the modern soul. Like Death himself he is the ultimate collector, putting together the emotional, cultural, and historical life of his generation with a brilliance and depth that outstrips in scope what Thomas Mann did for the prewar world in The Magic Mountain, that equals James Joyce's compendium of his time in Ulysses. He plays Beethoven to Rilke's Schubert, developing from Rilke's encapsulated emotional statements operative definitions about the nature of science, thought, and civilization. Pynchon is quite simply the genius of his generation. He is the Antichrist who offered up his own destructiveness to illuminate yours. Pynchon is the one man who realized that the moralist of our time would have to be the devil".
Quoted from: Josephine Hendin. "What is Thomas Pynchon telling us?" Harper's Magazine, March 1975: 90.
Antwerp: Damage after
V-2 hit Rex movie theatre, December 1944. The photograph does not show
the dust that covered the site for many hours, making it very difficult
to organise a rescue operation. The 1,200 spectators were watching Buffalo
Bill, starring William Wellmann and Maureen O'Hara. 567 died. [2]