Charles Mason (1728 -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 re-imagined by Thomas Pynchon, in an updated eighteenth-century novel featuring Native Americans and frontier folk, ripped bodices, naval warfare, conspiracies erotic and political and major caffeine abuse. We follow the mismatch'd pair - one rollicking, the other depressive; one Gothic, the other pre-Romantic - from their first journey together to the Cape of Good Hope, to pre-Revoluntionary America and back, through the stange yet redemptive turns of fortune in their later lives, on a grand tour of the Enlightenment's dark hemisphere, as they observe and participate in the many opportunities for insanity presented them by the Age of Reason.
| ISBN: | 9780099771913 |
| Publication date: | 2nd April 1998 |
| Author: | Thomas Pynchon |
| Publisher: | Vintage Classics an imprint of Vintage Publishing |
| Format: | Paperback |
| Pagination: | 784 pages |
| Genres: |
Historical Fiction Modern and Contemporary Fiction |