Letter from the editor.

Will the paranoid streak that runs broadly through contemporary cultural life ever lose its intensity? "The enemy is clearly delineated: he is a perfect model of malice, a kind of amoral superman--sinister, ubiquitous, powerful, cruel, sensual, luxury-loving." So Richard Hofstadter described in Harper's in 1964 the particular frame of thinking that made up the "paranoid style" of American politics. The historian famously traced this thread of anti-intellectualism throughout the country's history and sized up the damage it had done to our political culture: "We are all sufferers from history," he wrote, "but the paranoid is a double sufferer, since he is afflicted not only by the real world, with the rest of us, but by his fantasies as well." Hofstadter's target then was the conspiracy-minded Right of the John Birch ilk, but what's changed perhaps most radically since the time of his analysis is the leftward migration of the paranoid style.

More than any other book, Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow captured the very moment at which the paranoid worldview seemed to settle like a damp fog over American culture at large. In that sense, no writer was more of his time--or ours--than Pynchon. In this issue of Bookforum, we look behind the scenes at how this novel, which emerged as a cultural phenomenon, came to fruition--and how a difficult, spiraling 768-page book, and its Greta Garbo of a reclusive author, galvanized a reading audience that included many future writers. Gerald Howard's text, presented on page twenty-nine, masterfully relates the hows and the whys--a story that includes far-seeing editors, marketing coups, and awards-banquet shenanigans around the publication of Pynchon's epic. As we considered the force of Howard's own opinion concerning Pynchon's influential shadow, we invited twenty other writers to weigh in on the novelist and his thirty-two-year-old tome. (Our fiction editor, Albert Mobilio, deserves singular praise for the vision behind this selection.) The diversity of our respondents, in age, gender, and genre, speaks volumes about the gravity of Gravity's Rainbow. One virtue of the responses we have gathered here is that they make the case for Pynchon the writer--in some cases even when they are less interested in his picture-perfect reflection of paranoia as a cultural condition. It is what makes him so much more than a novelist of ideas--and makes his writing crucial even today.

Editorially yours,

Eric Banks