Pynchon: A Collection of Critical Essays

Twentieth Century Views

by Edward Mendelson

225 pages, Hardcover

First published March 1, 1978

About the author

Edward Mendelson is a professor of English and Comparative Literature and the Lionel Trilling Professor in the Humanities at Columbia University. He is the literary executor of the Estate of W.H. Auden and the author or editor of several books about Auden's work, including Early Auden (1981) and Later Auden (1999). He is also the author of The Things That Matter: What Seven Classic Novels Have to Say About the Stages of Life (2006), about nineteenth- and twentieth-century novels, and Moral Agents: Eight Twentieth-Century American Writers (2015).
He has edited standard editions of works by W. H. Auden, including Collected Poems (1976; 2nd edn. 1990; 3rd edn., 2007), The English Auden (1977), Selected Poems (1979, 2nd edn., 2007), As I Walked Out One Evening (selected light verse, 1995), and the continuing Complete Works of W. H. Auden (1986– ).
His work on Thomas Pynchon includes Pynchon: A Collection of Critical Essays (1978) and numerous essays, including "The Sacred, the Profane, and The Crying of Lot 49" (1975; reprinted in the 1978 collection) and "Gravity's Encyclopedia" (in Mindful Pleasures: Essays on Thomas Pynchon). The latter essay introduced the critical category of "encyclopedic narrative," further elaborated in a later essay, "Encyclopedic Narrative from Dante to Pynchon".
He is the editor of annotated editions of novels by Thomas Hardy, George Meredith, Arnold Bennett, H.G. Wells, and Anthony Trollope. With Michael Seidel he co-edited Homer to Brecht; The European Epic and Dramatic Traditions (1977).
He was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2015. He was elected a Member of the American Philosophical Society in 2017. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, and was the first Isabel Dalhousie Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities at the University of Edinburgh.
Before teaching at Columbia, he was an associate professor of English at Yale University and a visiting associate professor of English at Harvard University. He received a B.A. from the University of Rochester (1966) and a Ph.D. from the Johns Hopkins University (1969).
Since 1986 he has written about computing, software, and typography and is a contributing editor of PC Magazine.
He is married to the writer Cheryl Mendelson.

Reviews

[Маx Nestelieiev · Rating 4 out of 5]

nice collection, and the most valuable article in it is -
The sacred, the profane, and The crying of lot 49 / Edward Mendelson

[Garrett Zecker · Rating 3 out of 5]

I read this book as a companion to Gravity's Rainbow as I was reading it. It was a helpful collection of clear scholarly articles of TP and his works. It allowed a little space for summary as well as a little space for the purpose of exploring why his work is so important. It was very helpful, and I suggest anyone reading any of Pynchon's early books, (V, Gravity, Crying, etc) to read this along with it.