On March 1, 1973, reviewer Bruce Allen declared Thomas Pynchon's third novel, Gravity's Rainbow, to be "the most important work of fiction yet produced by any living writer". However, Allen wrote to Viking, the publishers, about the $15 cost of the hardback.
Pynchon - the notoriously reclusive author of the 2009 novel Inherent Vice on which the recent film is based - wrote to Allen in subsequent correspondence. The letter, published on thomaspynchon.com runs as follows:
Dear Bruce Allen
Thank you for that really extravagant review of Gravity's Rainbow. It was a good ego trip for me, and I guess it must've cheered up Viking's advertising people too. Now as to the $15 Difficulty, well, if the book sells lousy they'll call it Viking's Folly, and if it sells good it will be a great enlightened Watershed In Publishing History or something, but I don't know if anybody can predict ahead of time what's going to happen with any degree of confidence.
You probably know better than me how much superstition rules the publishing business. I try to stay out of it as much as I can, because nobody at Viking pays any attention to me – my feeling was that the whole ******* thing ought to be paperback. The idea was to get it to people who can't afford $15. But They had their own ideas..."
The letter, which continues on for some more paragraphs, was spotted at last weekend's 48th California International Antiquarian Book Fair.
It was placed in an archive containing other Pynchon-related items, including the advance bound manuscript and first hardback edition of Gravity's Rainbow, with an overall asking price of $35,000.
