Mason & Dixon

Mason & Dixon is a novel by the American writer Thomas Pynchon, published in 1997. It offers a fictionalized account of the partnership between Charles Mason and Jeremiah Dixon, two British astronomers and surveyors whose expeditions took them to the Dutch Cape Colony, Saint Helena, Great Britain and the boundary line that bears their name in British North America, on the eve of the American Revolutionary War.

The book is written in a style modeled on late eighteenth-century English and is a frame narrative. Its narrator is the Reverend Wicks Cherrycoke, a clergyman of doubtful orthodoxy who, on a cold December evening in 1786, tries to entertain his extended family in Philadelphia, partly for amusement and partly to keep his welcome as a guest, by telling a tall-tale version of Mason and Dixon's lives, claiming to have accompanied them throughout their travels.

Pynchon began work on the novel as early as 1975, and in 1978 it was reported that he was in England researching the lives of the two men. For years it was rumored to be his next book after Gravity's Rainbow, until the publisher formally announced it in October 1996 with a first printing of 200,000 copies. It appeared on April 30, 1997.

The plot follows the pair on their missions to observe the transit of Venus and to survey territory. Episodes range from the attentions paid to Mason by the daughters of a Dutch colonist at the Cape, to isolated life on Saint Helena, and to growing tensions between the Crown and its colonies. The novel combines scientific precision, humor, social satire on slavery and colonial trade, and a reflection on the human urge to measure and order the world.

Its reception was divided. Some critics regarded it as one of the most ambitious American novels of recent decades, praising its erudition, comic energy and linguistic vitality. Others found it overlong and diffuse. Over time it has become one of Pynchon's most debated books and a touchstone of postmodern historical fiction.