Thomas Pynchon and American Counterculture
Cambridge Studies in American Literature and Culture Series

Thomas Pynchon and American Counterculture employs the revolutionary sixties as a lens through which to view the anarchist politics of Pynchon's novels. Joanna Freer identifies and elucidates Pynchon's commentaries on such groups as the Beats, the New Left and the Black Panther Party and on such movements as the psychedelic movement and the women's movement, drawing out points of critique to build a picture of a complex countercultural sensibility at work in Pynchon's fiction. In emphasising the subtleties of Pynchon's responses to counterculture, Freer clarifies his importance as an intellectually rigorous political philosopher. She further suggests that, like the graffiti in Gravity's Rainbow, Pynchon creates texts that are 'revealed in order to be thought about, expanded on, translated into action by the people', his early attraction to core countercultural values growing into a conscious, politically motivated writing project that reaches its most mature expression in Against the Day.

1. On the road to anti-structure: V., The Crying Lot 49 and the Beats; 2. Love, violence and yippie subversion in Gravity's Rainbow: Pynchon and the New Left; 3. The psychedelic movement, fantasy and anarchism in The Crying Lot 49 and Against the Day; 4. The Black Panther Party, revolutionary suicide and Gravity's Rainbow; 5. Feminism moderate and radical in The Crying Lot 49 and Vineland: Pynchon and the women's movement.

Joanna Freer obtained her PhD in American literature from the University of Sussex in 2012. Freer has written for the Journal of American Studies and has published book reviews in American Studies Today and Orbit: Writing around Pynchon.