(born 1937) Certainly one of the most important of America’s postwar novelists. In works such as V (1963), Gravity’s Rainbow (1973) and Mason and Dixon (1997), Pynchon combined pyrotechnic verbal skills and a near-encyclopedic knowledge of both learned and popular culture to produce a distinctive fictional universe, rife with paranoiac visions and textual puzzles. Along with J.D. Salinger, Pynchon was also one of literary America’s most famous recluses, so successfully excluding the trappings of public celebrity that his whereabouts became a topic of rumor and speculation. This mysterious and shadowy existence, along with his unique fictional vision, found a ready fit to an age much given over to elaborate conspiracies about the powers-that-be.