The Unabomber was an anarchist and domestic terrorist responsible for over a dozen bombings over a seventeen year spell, killing three and injuring many more. Thomas Pynchon is a celebrated novelist of encyclopaedic tomes. Not much reason to conflate the two, or so youd think. Yet in the 1970s there was a school of thought that they were both the one and the same. The reasoning lies in the mysterious nature of both figures. Pynchons reclusiveness is perhaps comparable only to J.D. Salinger in recent years. A writer by the name of John Calvin Batchelor even went as far as to pen an essay, arguing Pynchon was in fact J.D. Salinger. Others have claimed he was merely an alter ego of the postmodernist William Gaddis. That Pynchons fiction carries at times a pro-counterculture, anti-capitalist vibe is possibly what drew comparisons to the Unabomber. Been staunchly reclusive is seemingly all thats required for speculators to make grandiose statements. The Unabomber was eventually found to be one Theodore John Kaczynski. Arrested in 1996, he is now serving eight life sentences. Thomas Pynchon is still alive and writing, long after the incarceration of Kaczynski and the deaths of William Gaddis and J.D. Salinger.
