Synopsis
Charles Mason and Jeremiah Dixon were the British Surveyors best remembered for running the boundary between Pennsylvania and Maryland that we know today as the Mason-Dixon Line. Here their story is re-imagined by Thomas Pynchon in an updated 18th-century novel featuring Native Americans and frontier folk, ripped bodices, naval warfare, conspiracies erotic and political, and major caffeine abuse.

Details
Publication Date:	1997-04-01

Size
Length:	773 pages
Height:	10 in
Width:	6.8 in
Thickness:	2.5 in
Weight:	43.2 oz

Publisher's Note
Charles Mason (1928-1786) 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, in an updated 18th-century novel featuring Native Americans and frontier folk, ripped bodices, naval warfare, conspiracies erotic and political, and major caffeine abuse. Unreflectively entangled in crimes of demarcation, Mason and Dixon take us long on a grand tour of the Enlightenment's dark hemisphere, from their first journey together to the Cape of Good Hope, to pre-Revolutionary American 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 - pursue a linear narrative of irregular lives, observing, and managing to participate in, the many occasions of madness presented them by the Age of Reason.

Follows mismatched British surveyors Charles Mason and Jeremiah Dixon as they make their way through frontier hardships, Native Americans, warfare, conspiracies, and other perils of eighteenth-century, pre-Revolutionary America

Industry Reviews
"Here's a 784-page head-scratcher, a massive novel on a fascinating topic written by one of our most brilliant and beloved authors, a tome loaded with highbrow razzle-dazzle and raffish low comedy, deep thoughts and dizzy riffs--yet the whole thing is painfully inaccessible. If 'Vineland', the 1990 flop that broke 17 years of cult-nurturing silence, forced us to face the possibility that the author of 'V.' and 'Gravity's Rainbow' had exhausted his talent as a writer, 'Mason & Dixon' proves that Thomas Pynchon still has the stuff but no longer knows what to do with it."
New York Observer - Adam Begley (04/28/1997)

"There is so much more to this rich, endlessly inventive and thoughtful book--religion, race, sex, family, math, metaphysics, the opportunism and savagery of the American spirit, the impossibility of arriving at a unified vision of the spirit--that reviewing it is a bit like reviewing the Atlantic Ocean."
Village Voice - Laura Miller (05/06/1997)

"A dazzling work of imaginative re-creation."
Washington Post Book World - Michael Dirda (04/27/1997)

"Very grand and mad and beautiful....I can't even remember having reviewed a more original novel."
Spectator - Philip Hensher (05/03/1997)

"'Mason & Dixon'--like 'Huckleberry Finn', like 'Ulysses'--is one of the great novels about male friendship in anybody's literature."
Nation - John Leonard (05/12/1997)

"For those who were puzzled by 'Vineland' and its sense of the original hipster striving gallantly to radiate the full spectrum of hip, the news here is nothing but good. This is the old Pynchon, the true Pynchon, the best Pynchon of all. 'Mason & Dixon' is a groundbreaking book, a book of heart and fire and genius, and there is nothing quite like it in our literature, except maybe 'V.' and 'Gravity's Rainbow'."
New York Times Book Review - T. Coraghessan Boyle (05/18/1997)

"An astonishing and wonderful book."
New York Review of Books - Louis Menand (06/12/1997)

"Let's see now. Fervent consumption of mood-altering substances...a certain reckless vigor in the expression of opinion...pothead humor...It all sounds rather like the '60s of more recent memory. And that (as old-timey Communists used to say, and militia folk still do) is no accident!"
McLemee

"In the British, French, and Dutch naval empires Pynchon has at last discovered historical powers--historical legacies--worthy of his paranoia."
Kakutani