Its palatial Beaux-Arts home surrounded by lush gardens represents a very different California from the seedy surf towns, hippie communes and sprawling subdivisions of Pynchon’s novels set in the state. Its holdings in 20th century and contemporary literature include the papers of Hilary Mantel, Charles Bukowski, Eve Babitz and Octavia Butler. The Huntington, a private institution, has more than 11 million items in its collection, from treasures like a Gutenberg Bible and Shakespeare’s First Folio to contemporary photography. Nor would they confirm longstanding rumors about his writing process (did he really write “Gravity’s Rainbow” on graph paper?) or say when, if ever, Pynchon - a onetime engineering major and keen observer of technology who also suggested it is OK to be a Luddite - abandoned his Olivetti Lettera 22 (which got a shout-out in “Inherent Vice”) and started using a word processor. Those involved with the acquisition also declined to describe any particular items, or say whether they had spoken directly with Pynchon.

(Less unusually, it also declined to give the purchase price.)

The Huntington, unusually for the announcement of a major acquisition, declined to provide any images of the materials. This being Pynchon, the acquisition comes with a whiff of intrigue. And there are copious research notes on the many, many subjects (World War II rocketry, postal history, 18th-century surveying) touched on in his encyclopedic novels. There are typescripts and drafts of all his published books, from “V.” (1963) to “Bleeding Edge” (2013). The archive includes 48 boxes - 70 linear feet, in archivist-speak - of material dating from the late 1950s to the 2020s. While letters by him sporadically pop up for sale, those that have surfaced in publicly accessible archives have tended to disappear from view just as quickly, following protests from the famously private author.īut now, the Huntington Library, Art Museum and Botanical Gardens in San Marino, Calif., has acquired Pynchon’s literary archive, promising to open a window into the mind and methods of an author whose dense, erudite, playfully postmodern and often extremely long novels like “Gravity’s Rainbow” (760 pages) and “Against the Day” (1,085) have inspired serious scholarship, cultish devotion and wild-eyed conspiracy theories. Only a handful of confirmed photos of him are known to exist. For years, archival traces of the novelist Thomas Pynchon have been almost as rare as sightings of the man himself.

V. by Thomas Pynchon