Who Was That Masked Literary Researcher?

• 14 March 2003
• novels

According to The Memory Hole, Thomas Pynchon’s lost-ish writings for Boeing, dating between early 1960 and mid-1962, may in fact resurface. These technical articles, circulated internally among Boeing employees and clients, ran without attribution. They still exist in the Boeing archives, however, and according to Michael J. Lombardi, Boeing’s historian (about which, who knew they had one), copies of these publications have recently been given to “a literary researcher” who hoped to divine which were products of the Pynchon pen.

In a particularly Pynchonesque twist, Lombardi cannot remember who the researcher was (or at least “no longer has that information”), but claims that “[t]he researcher was going to write a book — so you might want to keep watch for that.”

I am now imagining corporate plot, or mysterious auction, or author in disguise, capering away with the goods. Is there any doubt among Pynchon readers that the true locus of the Boeing apocrypha, like the will of Pierce Inverarity, will never be wholly known? (Via The Morning News.)

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