“A screaming …

… comes across the sky”: certainly the most celebrated opening sentence in twentieth-century US fiction, probably surpassed, in the whole of American literary history, only by its nineteenth-century counterpart, the opening of Herman Melville's Moby-Dick (1850) – “Call me Ishmael.” What screams across the sky in this signature sentence is a V-2 rocket – or a nightmare of one – falling on London in 1944, and the novel that it opens is of course Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow (1973), generally acknowledged to be a masterpiece of American and world literature. The author of seven novels to date – four of them of gigantic proportions, the other three more conventionally scaled – as well as a volume of short stories, Pynchon is a major figure of postwar American literature despite (or because of) his formidable difficulty, polymathic range of reference, personal elusiveness and reputation for outrage and obscenity.

It is impossible to conceive of postmodernism in literature without reference to Pynchon's fiction. Canonized in the 1980s as the foremost American postmodernist mainly on the strength of his two most celebrated novels – The Crying of Lot 49 (1966) and Gravity's Rainbow – he has become a staple of academic reading lists dealing with the period. Indeed, while his works are all complex, and some of them are massive, his indispensable position in the literary canon has ensured that he is widely taught on all university levels in the US and Europe, and that he remains a popular topic of advanced research at colleges and universities around the world.