"For all those folks who want to read Vineland, but are uneasy about making their way in, we've put together a starter kit, a Captain Midnight Decoder Ring that will serve you as a resource, a reference, a map, and a handy-dandy Pynchon guru all in one..."
Between 1963 and 1973, the American author Thomas Pynchon (born in 1937) published three novels: V. (1963); The Crying of Lot 49 (1966); and Gravity's Rainbow (1973). Taken together, these dense, critically acclaimed books form a kind of loosely intertwined trilogy in which certain characters and themes occasionally reappear. The very length of Gravity's Rainbow (over 700 pages long) seemed to suggest that, with its publication, a cycle -- perhaps the cycle -- had been completed. Maybe Pynchon would never publish another novel. How could he? What more could he have left to say? As the years (the 1980s) went by and a fourth Pynchon novel didn't come out, it seemed that the author -- well-known for keeping his "private life" truly private, for not even allowing his photograph to be taken -- had indeed quit when he was ahead, and stopped writing novels
THE DAY THAT ENDS THE DREAM OF THOMAS PYNCHON is the same old day of V. It is also the screaming across the sky in Gravity's Rainbow, and the future it would be death to enter after leaving Vineland, and the blistering echolalia from within the Hollow Earth, the drum roll of the Disappeared which tells the penetrant heroes of Mason & Dixon that what stains the world you rape stains you. There is nothing newer than this in the hundreds of thousands of words that make up the latest and most Pynchonesque novel yet by America's greatest Fool writer, except for the fact that it is all over now.
Miss Williams tried therapy, but says she gave up when two successive psychiatrists sat gaga before a movie star. In 1959, her career at a seeming end and her second marriage over, she did try LSD under the direction of Cary Grant's psychiatrist, and had a hallucinatory experience in which she envisioned herself in the body of her older brother Stanton, a child movie actor who had died years earlier as a teen-ager, and whose mantle she realized she had assumed. She begins her book with an account of the trip.
This paper analyzes a Wiki which has been developed for annotating the novel 'Against the Day' by Thomas Pynchon in terms of how it functions as a tool for online research collaboration.