Thomas Pynchon and American Counterculture

This volume explores the complex fiction of Thomas Pynchon within the context of 1960s counterculture.

Thomas Pynchon and American Counterculture examines Pynchon's novels in their relation to 1960s counterculture. Much has been made of Pynchon's ambiguity, but in this volume, Joanna Freer offers a concrete account of Pynchon's politics, thereby emphasising commentaries within Pynchon's fiction on the Beats, the New Left, the Black Panther Party, the psychedelic movement and the women's movement.Thomas Pynchon and American Counterculture employs the revolutionary sixties as a lens through which to view the anarchist politics of Pynchon's novels. Joanna Freer identifies and elucidates Pynchon's commentaries on such groups as the Beats, the New Left and the Black Panther Party and on such movements as the psychedelic movement and the women's movement, drawing out points of critique to build a picture of a complex countercultural sensibility at work in Pynchon's fiction. In emphasising the subtleties of Pynchon's responses to counterculture, Freer clarifies his importance as an intellectually rigorous political philosopher. She further suggests that, like the graffiti in Gravity's Rainbow, Pynchon creates texts that are 'revealed in order to be thought about, expanded on, translated into action by the people', his early attraction to core countercultural values growing into a conscious, politically motivated writing project that reaches its most mature expression in Against the Day.