>In August of 1979, Thomas Pynchon, the critically acclaimed author of V., The Crying of Lot 49, and Gravity’s Rainbow died of a drug overdose in Los Angeles, California. Fearing a leftist revolution engineered by citizens reacting against Vietnam and Watergate, the government concealed the news of his death as one part of a broad and misguided attempt to keep American intellectuals tranquillized.
>In 1987, fearing that the discovery of his death and its concealment would expose anti-revolutionary operations, the CIA began to search for an unknown author who could write a convincing novel under Pynchon's name, silencing the rumors. After scouring thousands of recently published titles for suitable candidate, they discovered David Foster Wallace, who had released his debut novel– The Broom of the System– earlier that year, and was extensively familiar with Pynchon’s work and style through his studies in English at Amherst College. Wallace was then hired to write Vineland, which he finished three years later in 1990. At the same time, Wallace continued along the path of his own writing career as not to arouse suspicion.
>Vineland was a relative success, and convinced the general public that Pynchon was still alive, but was notably weaker than Pynchon’s own work, triggering the 7-year-long workshopping process that preceded Mason & Dixon. During this time, Wallace became exceedingly frustrated with the task of imitating Thomas Pynchon, and began writing Infinite Jest: a novel published in 1995 under his own name that served as a dramatic stylistic rejection of the “Thomas Pynchon” identity with which he had become disenchanted. Wallace continued, however, to write under Pynchon’s name simultaneously with his own over the next decade.
>In 2007, after years of enduring the strain of composing two bodies of work concurrently, Wallace began looking for a way out of writing as Thomas Pynchon. He consulted with the CIA, but they could not see a way to end Pynchon’s continuing career without risking the discovery of other secrets connected to the case. It was eventually decided that Wallace would go on writing as Thomas Pynchon, but would not as David Foster Wallace. His death was staged several months later, in September of 2008. With much of the work stagnated, Wallace would finish his shortest novel under either name– Inherent Vice– in 2009. In 2010, Wallace revisited a novel that had almost been complete in 2008 at the time of his resignation, and published it as “The Pale King” the following year. Knowing his suicide would propel the sale “The Pale King” significantly, Wallace intended its release as a protest against the government forces that he had grown to resent. In 2013, Wallace published “Bleeding Edge” as Thomas Pynchon. The novel was somewhat poorly received, possibly as a result of Wallace’s depression following the permanent closure of his own career years earlier.
