Thomas Pynchon is the greatest disappearing act in American literature. He's one of the country's most celebrated but least- known novelists, a writer of vast, fiendish bestsellers who refuses to be interviewed or photographed, won't divulge where he lives and never makes public appearances.

Other authors have disappeared from view - Harper Lee and J.D. Salinger, for example - but none has matched Pynchon's tantalising brand of invisibility. Facts about him are skeletal. We know that he was born in 1937 and grew up in Long Island; that he studied at Cornell and served briefly in the US Navy; that he worked for Boeing writing technical documents in the early 1960s while writing his first novel, V. Then nothing: just gossip, guesswork and fugitive nuggets of information, such as that he's thought to be married to his agent and living in New York.