At the 1974 National Book Awards, a double-talking comedian named Irwin Corey accepted the prize for Gravity’s Rainbow while a streaker ran across the stage, and the actual author was nowhere to be found. This episode traces Thomas Pynchon from a Long Island childhood with an engineer father and nurse mother, through skipping two grades, engineering physics at Cornell, a Navy stint as an electrician on the USS Hank during the Suez Crisis, and a return to Cornell for an English degree and classes with Vladimir Nabokov.

We follow his years writing safety material for Boeing’s Bomarc missile program, the 1963 debut V., a rejected application to a Berkeley math program, and The Crying of Lot 49 with its application of entropy to information overload. We examine Gravity’s Rainbow, drafted on engineers’ graph paper, the Pulitzer board’s veto of its own jury, the rumors that he was J.D. Salinger or the Unabomber, the 1997 CNN ambush, and his argument that recluse is just a journalist’s code word. Finally, we cover his late-career run from Vineland to Shadow Ticket, his cyberpunk influence, and the Simpsons cameo with a bag over his head.

• How physics and naval engineering shaped his portrayal of bureaucracies as literal machines
• The Boeing years as reconnaissance inside the military-industrial complex
• Entropy and information decay in The Crying of Lot 49
• The National Book Award chaos and the Pulitzer board’s refusal to give any fiction prize
• Why a man who hid from cameras voiced himself on The Simpsons, and the Springfield connection to his ancestor William Pynchon