The famously reclusive novelist Thomas Pynchon is a recipient of the prestigious MacArthur Fellowship. Gravity's Rainbow, perhaps the most dense and complex of all his novels, won the National Book Award for Fiction in 1974. Christopher Lehmann-Haupt said of it: "... if I were banished to the moon tomorrow and could take any five books along, this has to be one of them." Pynchon's other books include V., The Crying of Lot 49, Mason and Dixon, and Inherent Vice
