Thomas Pynchon is one of America's most stylistically adventurous and reclusive writers, and the publication of his new novel Mason and Dixon is one of the literary events of the year. It concerns two British surveyors who charted the boundary between Maryland and Pennsylvania that became a frontier between the free
North and the slave-owning South.
Patrick Wright reviews the novel and Pynchon's literary career. And he talks to Henry Louis Gates , a leading scholar and writer on African-
American literature.
Producer Fiona Bailey