On May 8, 1937, Thomas Pynchon was born. Pynchon's novels are usually long and complex, with large casts of characters. He explores large social and political themes – racism, class, imperialism – and often blurs the lines between high and low culture. There's usually a musician character in his books, and Pynchon has written about his fondness for jazz and rock.

Pynchon's earliest novels were the most strongly received by critics. 1963's V. (e-book | print) alternates between two stories, one featuring a group of New York bohemians in the mid-1950s, and the other about one man's decades-long search for a mysterious person he known only as "V". That was followed in 1966 by Pynchon's shortest novel, The Crying of Lot 49 (e-book | print | audio), in which a woman stumbles into the ancient rivalry between two secretive postal systems.

Gravity's Rainbow (e-book | e-audio | print), published in 1973, is Pynchon's most acclaimed novel. It's set mostly in Europe at the end of World War II, and is centered on the German V-2 rocket program. It shared the National Book Award and was nominated for science fiction's Nebula Award. The Pulitzer Prize fiction jury in 1974 voted to give the award to Gravity's Rainbow, but was overruled by the Pulitzer Advisory Board, who chose to give no award that year.

In his later novels, Pynchon continues to explore a wide range of styles and subjects. Vineland (e-book | print) looks at the lives of 1960s radicals in the age of Ronald Reagan; Mason & Dixon (e-book | print) is a fictionalized look at the exploits of the surveying team in the years leading up to the Revolutionary War.

Against the Day (e-book | e-audio | print | audio) is Pynchon's longest novel, more than 1,000 pages long. It takes place between the 1893 World's Fair and the end of World War I; much of it is written in imitation of popular fiction genres of the era – boy's adventure stories, westerns, scientific adventure in the style of Jules Verne, and so on.

Inherent Vice (e-book | print | audio) may be Pynchon's most reader-friendly novel; it's a shaggy-dog detective story featuring a stoner private eye in 1970s Los Angeles. Paul Thomas Anderson directed the fim adaptation (DVD), starring Joaquin Phoenix, Josh Brolin, and Katharine Waterston. Pynchon's most recent novel, Bleeding Edge (e-book | e-audio | print | audio), is another detective story, this one more serious in tone; it's set against the backdrop of the 9/11 terror attacks.

Pynchon is almost as famous for his reclusive nature as he is for his writing. He gives no interviews, and the few known photographs are almost all from his high school and college years. That has led to a variety of wild speculation; over the years, it has been suggested that Pynchon is really the Unabomber, a member of the Branch Davidian cult, or J. D. Salinger. (Pynchon's response to that last guess: "Not bad. Keep trying.")

Pynchon has appeared twice as himself on The Simpsons; his animated self wears a paper bag over his head to conceal his identity. There were reports that he appears in a small role in the 2014 film version of Inherent Vice, but they remain unconfirmed.

Also This Week

May 8, 1929

Louis Moreau Gottschalk was born. Gottschalk was a composer and pianist who was raised with a wide variety of musical influences, particularly from the Caribbean and South America. In the last decade of his short life, he was recognized as one of the finest concert pianists in the Americas. His own compositions were very popular during his lifetime, especially in Europe. Gottschalk died in Brazil at the age of 40, of complications following a case of yellow fever. A collection of Gottschalk's piano music is available for streaming or download at Freegal.

May 12, 1846

Five hundred wagons left Independence, Missouri, headed for California. Among them were the nine wagons of the Donner and Reed families. The journey should have taken four to six months, but a variety of errors and misfortunes delayed the Donner party, who were trapped in the Sierra Nevadas by an early snowfall in November. When a rescue party finally arrived in November, only 48 of the 87 members of the Donner party were still alive, many of them having survived only by eating the flesh of those who had died. Michael Wallis tells the story of the Donner party in The Best Land Under Heaven (e-book | print).

May 7, 1943

Peter Carey was born. Carey is an Australian novelist who has lived in the United States since 1990; it is only in the last decade, though, that he has begun to write novels set outside Australia. Carey has twice been awarded the Booker Prize for the year's best novel written in English, for Oscar and Lucinda (e-book | print; Ralph Fiennes and Cate Blanchett star in the 1997 film adaptation) and True History of the Kelly Gang (e-book | print).

May 11, 1997

The chess-playing computer Deep Blue defeated reigning world champion Garry Kasparov in the final game of their match, winning by a score of 3½ - 2½, the first time a computer had defeated the human champion. Kasparov had defeated Deep Blue 4 – 2 a year earlier. At the time of his loss, Kasparov said that he believed human players had intervened and made some of Deep Blue's moves, and demanded a rematch. IBM's programmers denied that they had cheated, and dismantled the computer. Kasparov writes about the match, and about the history and possibilities of machine intelligence, in Deep Thinking (e-book | e-audio | print).