Thomas Pynchon's classic "Gravity's Rainbow" flew out of the South Bay

Author wrote his famed book while living in a Manhattan Beach bachelor apartment.

By Josh Grossberg

He's one of America's most celebrated living writers — the author of two books on Time magazine's list of the 100 all-time best novels. And through his reclusive nature, Thomas Ruggles Pynchon also sets the standard for mystery. Only a handful of photographs of him exist and nobody seems to know where he lives.

It's an image that Pynchon himself likes to toy with. He's appeared twice on "The Simpsons," but while he provided his voice, the head of his cartoon rendering is covered with a brown paper bag.

Among the few things known about Pynchon is that for a time — before he was catapulted from relative obscurity to national fame — he spent time in a small Manhattan Beach apartment, where he wrote parts of what is considered his greatest work — the dense and difficult Gravity's Rainbow.

Published in 1973, the smart, funny, bawdy book is set in the waning days of World War II. With its famous opening line "A screaming comes across the sky," the complex story involves the creation of the V-2 rocket, mathematics, psychology and layered conspiracy theories.

A friend of Pynchon from Cornell University wrote in a 1974 Playboy magazine article that in the mid-1960s — the time he was writing the book — Pynchon lived in the South Bay, in an apartment in the 200 block of 33rd Street. Garrison Frost, who chronicles the South Bay's art scene on his Web site theaesthetic.com, conducted an investigation into the matter about 10 years ago. He interviewed local friends and neighbors — many of whom are now dead — who recalled a man who wasn't so much an oddball as a regular guy who preferred to avoid the spotlight. Frost's work has been cited by others as one of the most exhaustive studies into Pynchon's local connection.

"He was a very tall, nice man," said Evelyn Guy, who said Pynchon lived in a small bachelor apartment next to their beachfront home before he moved a few blocks away. "He would always get three or four months behind in his rent, and then he would catch up all at once."

Guy told Frost that Pynchon would stop by after he moved to collect his mail. He would sometimes stay for dinner and help her children with their homework. "We'd sit and talk for hours," she said. "We'd argue all the time. He was a liberal and I was a conservative. Of course, he was always smarter than I was." Guy said Pynchon never talked about his writing.

Another friend, Jim Hall, was stationed at Fort MacArthur in those days. He told Frost that Pynchon liked to hang out at local restaurants like El Tarasco on Rosecrans Avenue in Manhattan Beach.

Often compared with James Joyce's Ulysses, Gravity's Rainbow was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1974 by a three-member jury. But the rest of the 14-member board rejected the jury's decision, calling the book obscene, turgid and overwritten.

The book did win the National Book Award in 1974.

Born in 1937, Pynchon worked for a time writing manuals for Boeing in Seattle before permanently setting out on his writing career. Other famous works include V, The Crying of Lot 49 and Mason & Dixon.

Gravity's Rainbow doesn't mention Manhattan Beach, but in a later book, Vineland, Pynchon takes direct aim at the South Bay, featuring his typical sense of paranoia.

"In those years there were so many federal narcs in the area that if you were busted in the South Bay you actually stood less chance of its being the local Man than some fed. All the beach towns, plus Torrance, Hawthorne and greater Walteria, were in on some grandiose pilot project bankrolled by the inexhaustible taxpayer millions, appropriate chunks of which were finding their way to antidrug entities up and down every level of governance."

He doesn't mention Manhattan Beach by name, but another passage sounds very familiar.

"A California beach town, the houses tightly crowded, all trembling at the wind off the ocean ..."

Pynchon left the South Bay in the early 1970s. He was rumored to have lived in Northern California and Mexico. He was last believed to be living in New York.