Originally published on eve.gd on 8 June 2012, last updated 6 September 2026.
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Probably not. But...
I was proofreading some articles for Orbit this morning (which, by the way, will come out now as soon as I have DOI number permissions), when, during fact checking, I came across the following:
The picture is a yearbook entry from the Kansas State University yearbook, 1988, which was digitized last year. The image is not particularly clear -- and I cannot account, in any way, for why Pynchon would have been in this photograph (born in 1937 he went to Cornell university) -- but it does appear to show a moustached man, of about age 51 (in my estimation; he doesn't look like an undergraduate) clearly labelled "Thomas Pynchon" in the caption.
yearbook entry from the Kansas State University yearbook, 1988
A joke? Named coincidence? Seems unlikely to actually be Pynchon, so I don't feel too bad about putting this up!
Image copyright, used under fail dealing provisions for purposes of scholarship on a non-commercial basis.
This reference list has been generated, in many cases, through an automated process and may therefore contain errors or incomplete metadata. It is provided purely as assistance for finding the items mentioned within this post.
1. ‘Royal purple’, Internet Archive <http://archive.org/details/royalpurple1988unse>