When Gravity's Rainbow won the National Book Award in 1974, its famously reclusive author surprised everyone by turning up at the ceremony to collect the prize. Except that the rambling, shambling figure at the podium wasn't Thomas Pynchon at all, but a comedian and actor, 'Professor' Irwin Corey, who had been hired by Pynchon's publisher to impersonate the novelist. The audience gradually got the joke as Corey, who was once described by Kenneth Tynan as a 'travesty of all that our civilisation holds dear and one of the funniest grotesques in America', accepted the 'stipend' on behalf of 'Richard Python'. 'The great fiction story is now being rehearsed before our very eyes, in the Nixon administration,' Corey announced. He described Gravity's Rainbow as 'a small contribution to a certain degree, since there are over three and a half billion people in the world today: 218 million of them live in the United States, which is a very, very small amount compared to those that are dying elsewhere.'

LRB 10 September 2009 | PDF Download