Gravity’s Rainbow unfolds in the strange twilight at the end of World War II, when Europe is cracked open and the future is being assembled out of secrecy, science, and rumor. In this unsettled landscape, whispers move faster than trains, alliances fray without warning, and the sky itself feels unpredictable.
At the center drifts Tyrone Slothrop, an army lieutenant whose life keeps brushing against mysteries he doesn’t fully understand. Each answer he chases seems to open a new hallway, each discovery hints at forces far larger than any single person. The war may be ending, but something else is gathering momentum behind it, something powered by ambition, technology, and a fascination with what rockets might mean for the world to come.
Pynchon guides the reader through a Europe where the lines between fact and fear keep blurring. Scientists, soldiers, wanderers, and dreamers cross paths in a landscape humming with possibility and paranoia. The tone swings from absurd comedy to quiet dread, the way real life often does in times when history is shifting under everyone’s feet.
Gravity’s Rainbow is less a tale of war than a plunge into the energy that lingers after one ends. It captures the feel of a world teetering between past and future, and the uneasy thrill of realizing the biggest questions may not be the ones anyone is prepared to answer.
About the Author:
Thomas Ruggles Pynchon Jr. is an American novelist noted for his dense and complex novels. His fiction and nonfiction 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. (1963), The Crying of Lot 49 (1966), and Gravity's Rainbow (1973). Rumors of a historical novel about Charles Mason and Jeremiah Dixon had circulated as early as the 1980s; the novel, Mason & Dixon, was published in 1997 to critical acclaim. Pynchon is notoriously reclusive from the media; few photographs of him have been published, and rumors about his location and identity have circulated since the 1960s.
Description:
Gravity’s Rainbow unfolds in the strange twilight at the end of World War II, when Europe is cracked open and the future is being assembled out of secrecy, science, and rumor. In this unsettled landscape, whispers move faster than trains, alliances fray without warning, and the sky itself feels unpredictable.
At the center drifts Tyrone Slothrop, an army lieutenant whose life keeps brushing against mysteries he doesn’t fully understand. Each answer he chases seems to open a new hallway, each discovery hints at forces far larger than any single person. The war may be ending, but something else is gathering momentum behind it, something powered by ambition, technology, and a fascination with what rockets might mean for the world to come.
Pynchon guides the reader through a Europe where the lines between fact and fear keep blurring. Scientists, soldiers, wanderers, and dreamers cross paths in a landscape humming with possibility and paranoia. The tone swings from absurd comedy to quiet dread, the way real life often does in times when history is shifting under everyone’s feet.
Gravity’s Rainbow is less a tale of war than a plunge into the energy that lingers after one ends. It captures the feel of a world teetering between past and future, and the uneasy thrill of realizing the biggest questions may not be the ones anyone is prepared to answer.
About the Author:
Thomas Ruggles Pynchon Jr. is an American novelist noted for his dense and complex novels. His fiction and nonfiction 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. (1963), The Crying of Lot 49 (1966), and Gravity's Rainbow (1973). Rumors of a historical novel about Charles Mason and Jeremiah Dixon had circulated as early as the 1980s; the novel, Mason & Dixon, was published in 1997 to critical acclaim. Pynchon is notoriously reclusive from the media; few photographs of him have been published, and rumors about his location and identity have circulated since the 1960s.