Thomas Pynchon’s letters are often sought after to provide clarity. The approximately three dozen available complete letters – along with extracts from others and juvenilia in letter form – supply material for interpretation as we attempt to develop a clearer view of a life, or a mind, that has been mostly mediated to us through autobiographical near-silence. In an undated letter denying critic Charles Hollander’s request to publish a collection of his short stories, Pynchon concludes, “Of Course silence is hard to interpret. If it wasn’t they’d call it ‘English,’ or something.” Sometimes, silence would not do: In another letter, one declining the prestigious Howell’s Medal for Fiction, Pynchon tells Richard Wilbur, president of the American Academy of Arts and Letters at the time, that there “appears to be only one way to say no, and that’s no.”