Charles Mason (1728 -1786) and Jeremiah Dixon (1733-1779) were the British Surveyors best remembered for running the boundary between Pennsylvania and Maryland that we know today as the Mason-Dixon Line. Here is their story as re-imagined by Thomas Pynchon, in an updated eighteenth-century novel featuring Native Americans and frontier folk, ripped bodices, naval warfare, conspiracies erotic and political and major caffeine abuse.
We follow the mismatch'd pair - one rollicking, the other depressive; one Gothic, the other pre-Romantic - from their first journey together to the Cape of Good Hope, to pre-Revoluntionary America and back, through the stange yet redemptive turns of fortune in their later lives, on a grand tour of the Enlightenment's dark hemisphere, as they observe and participate in the many opportunities for insanity presented them by the Age of Reason.
- ISBN10 0805058370
- ISBN13 9780805058376
- Publish Date 15 April 1998 (first published 15 April 1997)
- Publish Status Out of Print
- Out of Print 22 July 2015
- Publish Country US
- Imprint Henry Holt & Company Inc
- Format Paperback
- Pages 773
- Language English