One of the few photographic traces of the famously reclusive author Thomas Pynchon is a picture taken in 1965 outside of his apartment at 217 33rd Street, Manhattan Beach, Los Angeles County. Outside the front door with a pig-shaped piñata is his friend Phyllis Gebauer; all we see of Pynchon is his hand: a ghostly, hovering hand, outstretched over the top corner of his front door, throwing a peace symbol.
In this shabby one-room apartment, between the mid-1960s and the early ’70s, Pynchon wrote Gravity’s Rainbow, published 50 years ago in 1973. Blocking out the windows with towels, maps, and pictures of pigs, Pynchon would write holed up for weeks at a time in what, judging by the novel he produced, must have been a miraculously sustained, lucid haze of crystalline fury and compassionate intelligence, all of it directed against the anti-human impulses that were coming to define our high-tech world. The scientific, the poetic, the mythic, the political, the spiritual, the historical, the metaphysical—Pynchon’s creative method manages, somehow, to allow all of these to exist within the book’s pages.
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