Mason & Dixon

"A novel that is as moving as it is cerebral, as poignant as it is daring." - Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times

"Mason & Dixon - like Huckleberry Finn, like Ulysses - is one of the great novels about male friendship in anybody's literature." - John Leonard, The Nation

Charles Mason (1728–1786) and Jeremiah Dixon (1733–1779) were the British surveyors best remembered for running the boundary between Pennsylvania and Maryland that we know today as the Mason-Dixon Line. Here is their story as reimagined by Thomas Pynchon, featuring Native Americans and frontier folk, ripped bodices, naval warfare, conspiracies erotic and political, major caffeine abuse.

Unreflectively entangled in crimes of demarcation, Mason & Dixon take us along on a grand tour of the Enlightenment’s dark hemisphere, from their first journey together to the Cape of Good Hope, to pre-Revolutionary America and back to England, into the shadowy yet redemptive turns of their later lives, through incongruities in conscience, parallaxes of personality, tales of questionable altitude told and intimated by voices clamoring not to be lost.

Along the way they encounter a plentiful cast of characters, including Benjamin Franklin, George Washington, and Samuel Johnson, as well as a Chinese feng shui master, a Swedish irredentist, a talking dog, and a robot duck. The quarrelsome, daring, mismatched pair—Mason as melancholy and Gothic as Dixon is cheerful and pre-Romantic—pursues a linear narrative of irregular lives, observing, and managing to participate in the many occasions of madness presented them by the Age of Reason.
"A novel that is as moving as it is cerebral, as poignant as it is daring... a book that testifies to Pynchon's remarkable powers of invention and his sheer power as a storyteller."
--Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times

"Mason & Dixon--like Huckleberry Finn, like Ulysees--is one of the great novels about male friendship in anybody's literature."
--The Nation

"Mason & Dixon is an amazing achievement... the novel of our time."
--Review of Contemporary Fiction
Thomas Pynchon is the author of V.The Crying of Lot 49Gravity’s RainbowSlow Learner, a collection of short stories; VinelandMason & DixonAgainst the Day; and, most recently, Inherent Vice. He received the National Book Award for Gravity’s Rainbow in 1974. View titles by Thomas Pynchon

About

"A novel that is as moving as it is cerebral, as poignant as it is daring." - Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times

"Mason & Dixon - like Huckleberry Finn, like Ulysses - is one of the great novels about male friendship in anybody's literature." - John Leonard, The Nation

Charles Mason (1728–1786) and Jeremiah Dixon (1733–1779) were the British surveyors best remembered for running the boundary between Pennsylvania and Maryland that we know today as the Mason-Dixon Line. Here is their story as reimagined by Thomas Pynchon, featuring Native Americans and frontier folk, ripped bodices, naval warfare, conspiracies erotic and political, major caffeine abuse.

Unreflectively entangled in crimes of demarcation, Mason & Dixon take us along on a grand tour of the Enlightenment’s dark hemisphere, from their first journey together to the Cape of Good Hope, to pre-Revolutionary America and back to England, into the shadowy yet redemptive turns of their later lives, through incongruities in conscience, parallaxes of personality, tales of questionable altitude told and intimated by voices clamoring not to be lost.

Along the way they encounter a plentiful cast of characters, including Benjamin Franklin, George Washington, and Samuel Johnson, as well as a Chinese feng shui master, a Swedish irredentist, a talking dog, and a robot duck. The quarrelsome, daring, mismatched pair—Mason as melancholy and Gothic as Dixon is cheerful and pre-Romantic—pursues a linear narrative of irregular lives, observing, and managing to participate in the many occasions of madness presented them by the Age of Reason.

Reviews

"A novel that is as moving as it is cerebral, as poignant as it is daring... a book that testifies to Pynchon's remarkable powers of invention and his sheer power as a storyteller."
--Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times

"Mason & Dixon--like Huckleberry Finn, like Ulysees--is one of the great novels about male friendship in anybody's literature."
--The Nation

"Mason & Dixon is an amazing achievement... the novel of our time."
--Review of Contemporary Fiction

Author

Thomas Pynchon is the author of V.The Crying of Lot 49Gravity’s RainbowSlow Learner, a collection of short stories; VinelandMason & DixonAgainst the Day; and, most recently, Inherent Vice. He received the National Book Award for Gravity’s Rainbow in 1974. View titles by Thomas Pynchon