Books

First edition, first printing, in the desirable hardback issue. This postmodern epic won the 1973 US National Book Award and was selected to win the 1974 Pulitzer Prize, a decision that was blocked by the prize's advisory board owing to the work's explicit content. Gravity's Rainbow is "often considered as the postmodern novel, redefining both postmodernism and the novel in general" (Pöhlmann). Pynchon's biographer declared it "one of the great historical novels of our time and arguably the most important literary text since Ulysses" (Tanner, p. 75). The paperback issue was published simultaneously. Octavo. Original orange cloth, spine lettered in red, rainbow blocked in blind on front cover, top edge orange. With dust jacket. Photographic cloudy background across frontispiece and title page. Faint splash mark to top edge, internally clean; unclipped jacket with slight creases and one or two nicks, spine and front panel sunned: a near-fine copy in very good jacket. Sascha Pöhlmann, "Thomas Pynchon, Gravity's Rainbow", The Literary Encyclopedia, 24 Oct. 2006, accessible online; Tony Tanner, Thomas Pynchon, 1982.