Wikipedia:Today's featured article/April 7, 2006

Thomas Pynchon is an American writer based in New York City. He is noted for his dense and complex fictions. After publishing several short stories in the late 1950s, he began composing the novels for which he is best known today: V. (1963), The Crying of Lot 49 (1966), Gravity's Rainbow (1973), Vineland (1990), and Mason & Dixon (1997). Pynchon is widely acclaimed as among the finest of contemporary authors; he is a MacArthur Fellow and a recipient of the National Book Award, and is regularly cited as a contender for the Nobel Prize in Literature. Both in his fiction and non-fiction his writing encompasses a vast array of subject matter, styles and themes, including (but not limited to) the fields of history, science and mathematics. Pynchon is also known for his avoidance of publicity: very few photographs of him have ever been published, and rumors about his location and identity have circulated since the 1960s. (continued...)