Thomas Pynchon

He served two years in the Navy before finishing an engineering physics degree at Cornell, where he may have sat in on Vladimir Nabokov's lectures, then spent several years as a technical writer for Boeing in Seattle, an unglamorous day job that fed the missile science running through Gravity's Rainbow.

The Pulitzer Prize's fiction jury recommended that novel unanimously in 1974; the advisory board overruled them, calling it unreadable and obscene, and gave no fiction prize at all that year. When Gravity's Rainbow won the National Book Award instead, Pynchon sent a comedian, 'Professor' Irwin Corey, to accept it in character.

No photograph of him has been reliably published since the 1950s; he has spent a public life in total privacy, surfacing once, memorably, as an animated, paper-bagged guest voice on The Simpsons.