Who is Thomas Pynchon – and why is everyone talking about ‘One Battle After Another’?

The man behind the myth

Born in 1937 in New York, Pynchon first enrolled for Engineering Physics and later, English, at Cornell University, during which he overlapped briefly with Vladimir Nabokov (though Nabokov later claimed not to remember him). Even though he had published several short stories earlier, it was V. that launched his reputation as a brilliant but opaque writer – a status only confirmed by The Crying of Lot 49 (1966) and Gravity’s Rainbow (1973), a sprawling postmodern epic about rockets, war, and entropy.

Despite Gravity’s Rainbow winning the National Book Award in 1974, it was famously denied the Pulitzer Prize – the jury praised its brilliance, but the board vetoed it as “unreadable”, “turgid”, “overwritten” and “obscene”. The Pulitzer Prize was not given out that year. That paradox – of genius and inaccessibility – has haunted Pynchon’s legacy ever since.

His body of work

Pynchon’s novels are dense, digressive, and, in a sense, preternatural in its countercultural characters, dark conspiracies, sci-fi overtones, slapstick humour, and unexpected tenderness.

In Vineland, for instance, the source material of Anderson’s film, Pynchon returned to the political disillusionment of the 1960s and the authoritarian drift of Ronald Reagan’s America. The book was dismissed by some contemporary critics but its paranoia and meditation on surveillance and lost idealism feel startlingly prescient.

Later works like Mason & Dixon (1997), Against the Day (2006), and Bleeding Edge (2013) continued to expand his imaginative terrain – from Enlightenment-era astronomy to the fallouts of modernism and a world altered by the internet and the 9/11 attacks. In 2009, Inherent Vice, a psychedelic noir set in 1970s California, proved to be his most film-friendly book – and it would become the only direct screen adaptation of his work.

How to film a Pynchon story

In 2014, Anderson directed Inherent Vice, a detective film starring Joaquin Phoenix. It received a mixed response but it was widely seen as a faithful reflection of Pynchon’s vibe, if not always his voice. Now, Anderson has returned to Pynchon, this time with One Battle After Another, in which, he mentioned in an interview, he “stole the parts that really resonated with me… I didn’t want to do a book report.”

The result is something far bolder – an energetic political thriller, a family drama, and a dark comedy of power, paranoia, and generational change. At the centre is Bob Ferguson (Leonardo DiCaprio), a washed-up radical hiding out with his daughter as the long arm of the state even as Sean Penn’s chilling Colonel Lockjaw closes in.

Released on September 26, One Battle After Another has become a cultural flashpoint. It opened to around $22 million at the US box office – a career-best for Anderson – and early international returns have been equally strong. Critics are calling it his most politically charged and accessible work in years. What makes the film resonate is not just its style – though there’s plenty of that – but its substance. In a time of increasing state surveillance, political disillusionment, and the hollowing out of activism, One Battle After Another feels uncannily timely. It’s a film about the loss of idealism, and the cost of memory, themes that echo not only through Vineland, but through all of Pynchon’s fiction.

A Pynchon renaissance

It’s an irony Pynchon himself might appreciate – after decades of keeping his distance from the public eye, he is now at the centre of a cultural moment he never asked for. October 7 will also see the release of his first novel in over a decade, Shadow Ticket, a noirish mystery set in 1930s Milwaukee. In the end, Pynchon’s great subject may be the tension between visibility and disappearance – between the desire to uncover hidden truths and the futility of ever fully knowing. Perhaps that’s why One Battle After Another works so well: it doesn’t try to get to the heart of who Pynchon might be. It embraces the mystery.