Gravity’s Rainbow is a 1973 novel written by Thomas Pynchon, a famously reclusive author who has never given a traditional interview. Gravity’s Rainbow won the National Book Award for Fiction and was nominated for the Nebula Award for Best Novel. It was also recently listed as the best book of the ‘70s by Collider.
Gravity’s Rainbow nearly won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction as well. However, even though it was selected by the jury to win the award, the Pulitzer Advisory Board was too offended by the book to officially award the prize to him. Instead, they didn't give out any award that year.
As reported by The New York Timesin 1974, “All three members of the Pulitzer Prize jury on fiction expressed distress and bewilderment yesterday that their unanimous recommendation for a prize for Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow had been turned down and that no fiction award was given this year.”
The outlet continued, “Members of the 14‐member board, which makes recommendations on the 18 Pulitzer Prize categories in journalism, letters, and music after jurors' reports, had described the Pynchon novel during their private debate as 'unreadable,' 'turgid,' 'overwritten' and in parts 'obscene.' One member editor said he had tried hard but had only gotten a third of the way through the 760‐page book.”
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According to the book’s Amazon description, “Gravity's Rainbow is a postmodern epic, a work as exhaustively significant to the second half of the twentieth century as Joyce's Ulysses was to the first. Its sprawling, encyclopedic narrative and penetrating analysis of the impact of technology on society make it an intellectual tour de force.”
The book has a 4.3-star rating on the site and a 4.0 rating on Goodreads with nearly 50,000 ratings. Although some readers think the book is too confusing, others believe that’s part of its charm.
As one reader stated, “You know that very brief moment after you wake up in the morning? That moment when you're not sleeping but you're not yet awake. You kind of know what's going but you're not fully aware. You're in consciousness limbo. When you read Gravity's Rainbow you fall into this consciousness limbo. You read the words on the page, but they don't all make sense. You're confused, you don't know what's going on, but... You love it.”
Pynchon is still writing to this day. His latest book, Shadow Ticket, was published in 2025.
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