Who

Considered alternately one of the best American authors and one of the most pretentious, Pynchon is the twisted mind behind Gravity's Rainbow and Against the Day. He's married to his agent, Melanie Jackson.

Backstory

The most intensely private literary hermit this side of J.D. Salinger, Pynchon was born on Long Island and groomed to be a scientist (he studied engineering at Cornell and worked as an engineer at Boeing). He started writing short stories in the late '50s and in 1963 published his first novel, V, which achieved major critical acclaim, as did the follow-up, The Crying of Lot 49, now a staple of college English classes. He won the National Book Award—and a ton more attention—for 1973's spectacularly dense Gravity's Rainbow. The Pulitzer committee also voted to give the book that year's prize for fiction, but was overruled by the Pulitzer board, which called it "turgid" and "unreadable." Pynchon's published just three books since: Vineland (1990), Mason & Dixon (1997), and, most recently, the 1,085-page monster Against the Day (2006).

Of note

Pynchon's works—whose labyrinthine plots draw on mathematics, science, history, psychology, and countless other intellectual fields—elicit diverse reactions from critics. Michiko Kakutani described his latest novel, which the LA Times thought was "his most successful and cogent articulation of the concerns that have haunted his work from the start," as "a humongous, bloated jigsaw puzzle of a story, pretentious without being provocative, elliptical without being illuminating, complicated without being rewardingly complex."

He's probably not losing much sleep over Michiko's words, having won just about every award there is: In addition to the National Book Award, he's picked up the William Faulkner Foundation Award for best first novel, the Richard and Hilda Rosenthal Foundation Award of the National Institute of Arts and Letters, a MacArthur Fellowship, and the Howells Medal—which he turned down, suggesting it be given to another author. Of course, he's as well known for his fanatical aversion to attention as for his literary prowess. He steers militantly clear of cameras, and there are no current pictures of him in the public domain. A CNN camera crew caught him on tape in 1997, but after the author pleaded with the network's execs, the network agreed not to air the footage.

Personal

Pynchon is married to his agent, Melanie Jackson. They have a son named Jackson, and live on the Upper West Side. Teenager Jackson is not as introverted as his father: He put up a Facebook profile in which he scandalously revealed that his favorite author is Kurt Vonnegut.

Family ties

Pynchon's niece is fisting expert and sex activist Tristan Taormino, who appeared in John Cameron Mitchell's Shortbus. Although Taormino tried to get Pynchon to do commentary on one of her porn films, he refused. Still, Taormino told Page Six, "We're more alike than different." She not totally off-base: Pynchon's novels are famously kinky and include passages featuring bestiality, and, everyone's favorite, coprophilia. (Look it up.)