Fatwa Rushdie Wiki

[Kayleigh Telega]

Larryincurs a fatwa from the Supreme Leader of Iran, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, after lampooning the Ayatollahs while appearing on Jimmy Kimmel Live! in promotion of his latest, long-awaited project, a comedy musical called Fatwa!, centered on The Satanic Verses controversy, in which Ayatollah Khomeini ordered a fatwa against Salman Rushdie in 1989. (from wikipedia)

Pynchon is regarded by many readers and critics as one of the finest 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 his fiction and non-fiction writings encompass 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 personal publicity: very few photographs of him have ever been published, and rumors about his location and identity have been circulated since the 1960s.

Thomas Pynchon was born in 1937 in Glen Cove, Long Island, New York, one of three children of Thomas Ruggles Pynchon, Sr. (1907-1995) and Katherine Frances Bennett (1909-1996). His earliest American ancestor, William Pynchon, emigrated to the Massachusetts Bay Colony with the Winthrop Fleet in 1630, and thereafter a long line of Pynchon descendants found wealth and repute on American soil. Pynchon's family background and aspects of his ancestry have provided source material for his fictions, particularly in the Slothrop family histories related in "The Secret Integration" (1964) and Gravity's Rainbow.

Pynchon attended Oyster Bay High School, where he was awarded "student of the year" and contributed short fictional pieces to his school newspaper: "Voice of the Hamster",[1] "The Boys",[2] and "Ye Legend of Sir Stupid and the Purple Knight".[3] These works featured many of the themes and literary devices he would use throughout his career: silly names, rampant drug use, and paranoia. After graduating in 1953 at the age of 16, he studied engineering physics at Cornell University, but left at the end of his second year to serve in the U.S. Navy. In 1957, Pynchon returned to Cornell to pursue a degree in English. His first published story, "The Small Rain", appeared in the Cornell Writer in May 1959, and narrates an actual experience of a friend who had served in the army; subsequently, however, episodes and characters throughout Pynchon's fiction draw freely upon his own experiences in the navy.

While at Cornell, Pynchon became a friend of Richard Faria, and both briefly led what Pynchon has called a "micro-cult" around Oakley Hall's 1958 novel Warlock. (He later reminisced about his college days in the introduction he wrote in 1983 for Faria's novel Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up to Me, first published in 1966.) Pynchon also reportedly attended lectures given by Vladimir Nabokov, who then taught literature at Cornell. While Nabokov later said that he had no memory of Pynchon (although Nabokov's wife, Vera, who graded her husband's class papers, commented that she remembered his distinctive handwriting; his later handwriting appears unexceptional), other teachers at Cornell, like the novelist James McConkey, recall him as being a gifted and exceptional student. In 1958, Pynchon and Cornell classmate Kirkpatrick Sale wrote part or all of a science-fiction musical, Minstral Island, which portrayed a dystopian future in which IBM rules the world. [1] Pynchon received his BA in June 1959.

After leaving Cornell, Pynchon began to work on his first novel. From February 1960 to September 1962, he was employed as a technical writer at Boeing in Seattle, where he compiled safety articles for the Bomarc Service News,[4] a support newsletter for the BOMARC surface-to-air missile deployed by the U.S. Air Force. Pynchon's experiences at Boeing inspired his depictions of the "Yoyodyne" corporation in V. and The Crying of Lot 49, and both his background in physics and the technical journalism he undertook at Boeing provided much raw material for Gravity's Rainbow. When it was published in 1963, Pynchon's novel V. won a William Faulkner Foundation Award for best first novel of the year.

After resigning from Boeing, Pynchon spent time in New York and Mexico before moving to California, where he was reportedly based for much of the 1960s and early 1970s, most notably in an apartment in Manhattan Beach, in Southern California.[5] Pynchon during this period embraced the lifestyle and values of the hippie counterculture, which he would later make use of in his 1990 novel Vineland.[6] In 1964, his application to study mathematics as a graduate student at the University of California, Berkeley, was turned down.[7] In 1966, he wrote a first-hand report on the aftermath and legacy of the Watts riots in Los Angeles. Entitled "A Journey Into the Mind of Watts," the article was published in the New York Times Magazine.[8]

From the mid-1960s Pynchon has also regularly provided blurbs and introductions for a wide range of novels and non-fiction works. One of the first of these pieces was a brief review of Hall's Warlock which appeared, along with comments by seven other writers on "neglected books", as part of a feature entitled "A Gift of Books" in the December 1965 issue of Holiday.

In April 1964, Pynchon wrote to his agent, Candida Donadio, that he was facing a creative crisis, with four novels in progress, and that "If they come out on paper anything like they are inside my head then it will be the literary event of the millennium."[9] In December 1965, Pynchon politely turned down an offer to teach literature at Bennington College, writing that he had resolved, two or three years earlier, to write three novels at once.[10] Pynchon called the decision "a moment of temporary insanity," but noted that he was "too stubborn to let any of them go, let alone all of them."

Pynchon's second novel, The Crying of Lot 49, was published a few months later in 1966. Whether it was one of the three or four novels Pynchon had in progress is unknown, but in a 1965 letter to Donadio, Pynchon had written that he was in the middle of writing a book that he called a "potboiler." When the book grew to 155 pages, he called it, "a short story, but with gland trouble," and hoped that Donadio "can unload it on some poor sucker." This would suggest that Crying of Lot 49 was not one of the four novels Pynchon was writing as of 1964, but no answer is certain.

The Crying of Lot 49 won the Richard and Hilda Rosenthal Foundation Award shortly after publication. Although more concise and linear in its structure than Pynchon's other novels, its labyrinthine plot features an ancient, underground mail service known as "The Tristero" or "Trystero," a parody of a Jacobean revenge drama entitled "The Courier's Tragedy," and a corporate conspiracy involving the bones of World War II American GIs being used as charcoal cigarette filters. It proposes a series of seemingly incredible interconnections between these and other similarly bizarre revelations that confront the novel's protagonist, Oedipa Maas. Like V, the novel contains a wealth of references to science and technology and to obscure historical events, and both books dwell upon the detritus of American society and culture. The Crying of Lot 49 also continues Pynchon's habit of composing parodic song lyrics and punning names, and referencing aspects of popular culture within his prose narrative. In particular, it incorporates several allusions to the Beatles and Nabokov's Lolita.

In 1968, Pynchon was one of 447 signatories to the "Writers and Editors War Tax Protest." Full-page advertisements in The New York Post and The New York Review of Books listed the names of those who had pledged not to pay "the proposed 10% income tax surcharge or any war-designated tax increase," and stated their belief "that American involvement in Vietnam is morally wrong".[11]

Pynchon's most celebrated novel is his third, Gravity's Rainbow, published in 1973. An intricate and allusive fiction which combines and elaborates on many of the themes of his earlier work, including preterition, paranoia, racism, colonialism, conspiracy, synchronicity, and entropy, the novel has spawned a wealth of commentary and critical material, including two reader's guides,[12] books and scholarly articles, on-line concordances and discussions,[13] and art works, and is regarded as one of the archetypal texts of American literary postmodernism. The major portion of Gravity's Rainbow takes place in London and Europe in the final months of the Second World War and the weeks immediately following VE Day, and is narrated for the most part from within the historical moment in which it is set. In this way, Pynchon's text enacts a type of dramatic irony whereby neither the characters nor the various narrative voices are aware of specific historical circumstances, such as the Holocaust, which are, however, very much to the forefront of the reader's understanding of this time in history. Such an approach generates dynamic tension and moments of acute self-consciousness, as both reader and author seem drawn ever deeper into the "plot", in various senses of that term. Encyclopedic in scope, the novel also displays enormous erudition in its treatment of an array of material drawn from the fields of psychology, chemistry, mathematics, history, religion, music, literature and film. Perhaps appropriately for a book so suffused with engineering knowledge, Pynchon reportedly wrote the first draft of Gravity's Rainbow in longhand on engineer's graph paper (aka "quadrille" paper), in California and Mexico City.

Gravity's Rainbow was a joint winner of the 1974 National Book Award for Fiction, along with Isaac Bashevis Singer's A Crown of Feathers and Other Stories. In the same year, the fiction jury unanimously recommended Gravity's Rainbow for the Pulitzer Prize; however, the Pulitzer board vetoed the jury's recommendation, describing the novel as "unreadable", "turgid", "overwritten", and in parts "obscene", and no prize was awarded.[14] In 1975, Pynchon declined the William Dean Howells Medal of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

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