Gravity’s Rainbow

Winner of the 1973 National Book Award, Gravity’s Rainbow is a postmodern epic, a work as exhaustively significant to the second half of the twentieth century as Joyce’s Ulysses was to the first. Its sprawling, encyclopedic narrative and penetrating analysis of the impact of technology on society make it an intellectual tour de force.

Gravity’s Rainbow shared the 1974 National Book Award with A Crown of Feathers and Other Stories by Isaac Bashevis Singer (split award). That same year, the Pulitzer Prize fiction panel unanimously recommended Gravity’s Rainbow for the award, but the Pulitzer board vetoed the jury’s recommendation, describing the novel as “unreadable”, “turgid”, “overwritten”, and in parts “obscene”. (Kihss 1974) (No Pulitzer Prize for Fiction was awarded and finalists were not announced before 1980.) In 1975, Pynchon declined the William Dean Howells Medal of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.