If you read through all of Thomas Pynchon’s eight novels, David Kipen has argued, they “fuse into one epic Pynchoverse, a crowded, panoramic canvas of the republic, from its earliest colonial stirrings clear down to the mounting, vertiginous terror of right now.” Pynchon’s “Yoknapatawpha of American and Western civilization” seems, however, to have one big, crucial historical hole, namely, the nineteenth century, the century that saw a young, provincial republic become a powerful nation ready for its imperialist overseas expansion. This is the reason why some Pynchon aficionados (myself included) cherish the suspicion or hope that the reclusive author may still have in store the last of his historical fictions, a novel set in the nineteenth century that would constitute the final piece of his huge puzzle. The rumor was spread by Salman Rushdie, who in his 1990 review of Vineland reported that a London magazine had announced “the publication of a 900-page Pynchon megabook about the American Civil War,” before he immediately dismissed it – “ho ho ho” – as an April fool’s prank. Yet somehow the idea stuck.