Thomas Ruggles Pynchon Jr. (born May 8, 1937) is an American author/writer. Upon graduation from CU., Pynchon had many options including teaching creative writing at Cornell, becoming a disk jockey, or a film critic for Esquire. "Gravity's Rainbow" was published in 1973. The year after it shared the National Book Award for fiction with Isaac Bashevis Singer's "A Crown of Feathers". It was also unanimously selected by the judges for the Pulitzer Prize in literature, but the selection was overruled by the Pulitzer advisory board whose members called it "unreadable," "turgid," "overwritten," and "obscene."