Description:
This is a significant new and accessible work on the leading modern American novelist whose works - notably Gravity's Rainbow, which won the 1974 U.S. National Book Award for Fiction - remain mysterious to many, just as his life remains reclusive.
Brief description: Albert Rolls earned his doctorate at the National University of Ireland, Galway and has published on numerous subjects: William Shakespeare, John Donne, Alexander Pope, Charlotte Lennox, and Thomas Pynchon among others. He has taught at a variety of CUNY campuses, as well as at other colleges, and worked as an editor at various publishing companies, including serving as editor-in-chief at AMS Press, Inc.
Review Quotes:
"A bold and ingenious undertaking. Around the necessarily slender armature of as-yet available biographical faces about the actual Pynchon, Rolls constructs a provocative three-dimensional representation of the virtual author or literary persona - as speculative hologram starting from what we know, analysing what we read, inferring what we can understand about the fiction in the light of the life and, subtly, vice versa. Dubini brothers, move over: this is a journey into the mind of Pynchon."
- John Kraftt, Professor Emeritus, Miami University.
"Albert Rolls has summoned a lively, worldly and informative account of Pynchon's career from out of the fog of hearsay and legend. Mining ephemera, rare documents and the fiction itself, Rolls assembles something many thought impossible: a coherent and credible account of the writer's career. Reading Rolls' book is like that moment when Dr. Watson spies a silhouette on the moor - suspecting a culprit, the reader soon recognizes the detective at work, solving a mystery."
- Henry Veggian, Senior Lecturer, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Advisory Editor for boundary 2