ABOUT
THE BOOK

British Surveyors Charles Mason and Jeremiah Dixon are best remembered for drawing the boundary between Pennsylvania and Maryland, known as the Mason-Dixon line. Thomas Pynchon re-imagines their story in this updated 18th-century novel featuring Native Americans and frontier folk, ripped bodices, naval warfare, erotic and political conspiracies, and major caffeine abuse. Mason & Dixon takes us on a grand tour of the Enlightenment’s dark hemisphere, from their first journey to the Cape of Good Hope, to pre-revolutionary America, and back to their shadowy but redemptive lives back in England. Along the way they meet a cast of characters, including Benjamin Franklin, George Washington and Samuel Johnson, as well as a Chinese feng shui master, a Swedish irredentist, a talking dog, and a robot duck. Widely regarded as one of America’s greatest novelists, Thomas Pynchon is the author of several books, including V, Gravity’s Rainbow, and Vineland