PYNCHON, Thomas. Gravity's Rainbow. New York: The Viking Press, 1973.
8vo. Original orange cloth with embossed design to upper board; spine lettered in red; upper edge orange; pictorial dust jacket with a design by Marc Getter; pp. [viii], 3-760, [ii]; a near-fine copy, lightly compressed to spine ends; in very good, clipped jacket, faded to spine (as is common), lightly rubbed and worn to extremities, particularly along the spine.
First edition, in a later state dust jacket - or possibly one intended for export - which has the ISBN 670-34832-5 to the lower panel, but lacking the '0273' code to the front flap, denoting first issue.
Pynchon's National Book Award-winning novel is set primarily in Europe at the end of World War II. Widely considered to be his greatest work, it was selected by the jury for the 1974 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, but was rejected by the Pulitzer Advisory Board due to its controversial content.
"The sprawling narrative comprises numerous threads having to do either directly or tangentially with the secret development and deployment of a rocket by the Nazis near the end of World War II. Lieut. Tyrone Slothrop is an American working for Allied Intelligence in London. Agents of the Firm, a clandestine military organization, are investigating an apparent connection between Slothrop’s erections and the targeting of incoming V-2 rockets. As a child, Slothrop was the subject of experiments conducted by a Harvard professor who is now a Nazi rocket scientist. Slothrop’s quest for the truth behind these implications leads him on a nightmarish journey of either historic discovery or profound paranoia, depending on his own and the reader’s interpretation. Despite its historical setting, the work resembles science fiction in its elaborate fabrication of sinister technology" Britannica.
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