Somewhere I had come up with the notion that one’s personal life had nothing to do with fiction, when the truth, as everyone knows, is nearly the direct opposite. . . . The single overtly autobiographical statement he has provided to date appears in the introduction to a collection of his early and only short fiction, Slow Learner: Thomas Pynchon - the most private, or publicly private, of American novelists - has been considering such disclosures for half a century now, in the way he’s handled both his famous family in his work and his own fame in life. (Hawthorne added the w to distance himself from John Hathorne, cruelest of the Salem magistrates.) This, of course, is merely a more public version of the decision of whether, and how, to transmute individual experience into prose. Edwin Pynchon (1856–1914), author of “Surgical Correction of Deformities of the Nasal Septum” and Thomas Ruggles Pynchon Jr., born in 1937, in Glen Cove, Long Island, author of V., The Crying of Lot 49, Gravity’s Rainbow, Slow Learner, Vineland, Mason & Dixon, Against the Day, Inherent Vice, and now Bleeding Edge.Īnyone who’s written at the end of so long and distinguished a line has been faced with a choice: either embrace the legacy or attempt to disassociate from it. (Among those who voted against the censure was William Hauthorne, Hawthorne’s first colonist ancestor.) This was the proto-American literary debut of a family that later included the Reverend Thomas Ruggles Pynchon (1823–1904), president of Trinity College, Hartford, and author of The Chemical Forces: Heat–Light–Electricity . . . He served as model for Colonel Pyncheon in Hawthorne’s The House of the Seven Gables, and in 1650 wrote The Meritorious Price of Our Redemption, whose critique of Puritan Calvinism caused it to be burned in Boston and to become the New World’s first banned book, though only nine copies survived the pyre. He established the towns of Roxbury and, while pursuing the fur trade, Springfield, where he deposed the accused witches in the trial preceding Salem. John’s son was also John, and his son was William Pynchon, who in 1630 sailed with John Winthrop to found the Massachusetts Bay Colony, of which he was elected treasurer. Nicholas Pinchon became High Sheriff of London in 1533, and his son, or nephew, John married Jane Empson, daughter of Sir Richard Empson, a minister to, and casualty of, the doomed regime of Henry VII. His son, Hugh, held seven “knights’ fees in Lincolnshire” and four “bovates in Friskney.” Four centuries later, his descendant Edward Pynchon was ennobled and granted a coat of arms “per bend argent and sable, three roundles with a bordure engrailed, counterchanged.” By then the Pincheuns had settled snugly into gentry life in Essex. Pinco de Normandie sailed to England with William the Conqueror.
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