William Pynchon

William Pynchon c.1590-1662, American colonist and theologian, b. England. An original patentee and assistant in the Massachusetts Bay Company, he migrated to America in 1630, where he helped found Roxbury and served as treasurer of the colony (1632-34). In 1636 he settled, and was commissioned to govern, a plantation at the confluence of the Connecticut and Agawam rivers, which he called Agawam but which was renamed Springfield in 1641. Through a flourishing fur trade he increased an already considerable fortune. While visiting England (1650), he published The Meritorious Price of Our Redemption, which expressed his liberal views of the atonement. The book was denounced as heretical and ordered burned in Massachusetts. Relenting somewhat but refusing to retract all of his opinions, Pynchon left his property to his son John and other children and returned permanently (1652) to England.

Pynchon, Thomas (1929–), novelist, born on Long Island, N.Y., after service in the navy, graduation from Cornell (1958), work as a technical writer for Boeing Aircraft in Seattle, and a year in Mexico, published his first novel, V., in 1963. A richly complex work, philosophically influenced by The Education of Henry Adams and Wittgenstein, it deals with two major figures in its plot. One is Benny Profane, a constant failure, who drifts through life in such enterprises as hunting alligators in New York's sewers and is associated with his friends, the Whole Sick Crew. Another major figure, the cultivated Herbert Stencil, is more purposeful as he searches the world for V., the mysterious female spy and anarchist, who is by turns Venus, Virgin, and Void. Pynchon's second novel, The Crying of Lot 49 (1966), is a shorter fable but marked by the same characteristics. Pynchon's plots are mystery stories combined with science fiction, but the novels' larger metaphors present in baroque fashion motifs not only of quest but of entropy, showing a closed world losing energy as time decays toward timelessness, and order disintegrates into alienation or chaos. Filled with endless esoteric references (including the parodying of other authors' styles) that range from high culture to trivial events, and marked by humor of wild comedy, the mock‐heroic, and satire, the novels present the reader a huge array of clues but no clear direction in their purposeful ambiguity. In his second novel the main figure is Oedipa Maas, a California woman whose legacy from a friend requires her to discover the true nature of her inheritance by following clues to a cabalistic social system known to many dispossessed Americans but hidden from people who live within conventional society. Pynchon's very long third novel, Gravity's Rainbow (1973, National Book Award), set in the closing years of World War II, is a story of plots and counterplots involving a Nazi Lieutenant Weissmann (once V.'s lover, for Pynchon's novels have echoes), disguised as Captain Blicero, and the American sleuth, Lieutenant Tyrone Slothrop, while V‐2 rockets fall on London. Like all Pynchon's works, the mood moves from black humor to lyricism, and the dream‐like fantasy is marked by labyrinthine interconnections until the reader is uncertain about what is “real” and what is imagined. More than a decade passed before Pynchon published another book, Slow Learner (1984), collecting five previously published stories, thus making even more distant and more remote his next novel, Vineland (1990). It is set during 1984, though with much reminiscence of the 1960s, in a so‐called Vineyard County of northern California and involves situations that are both exotic and strangely humorous. It concentrates on an uneasy family, particularly its young member, Prairie, daughter of an unusual man, Zoyd Wheeler, and her mother, Frenesi Gates, who has long since left to pursue her own romance with Brook Zond, a federal prosecutor who leads her into FBI officialdom as she undergoes many changes. Another novel, Mason & Dixon, appeared in 1997. Along with William Gaddis among the most experimental of contemporary American writers, Pynchon incorporates myriad influences and draws widely on science, from physics to information theory.

Meatpacking and Meat Processing Industry. Commercial meatpacking in North America dates from 1660, when entrepreneur William Pynchon began selling preserved pork from an abandoned warehouse in Springfield, Massachusetts. In the Antebellum Era, meatpacking and processing concentrated in Cincinnati, where the Ohio River provided low‐cost transport of pork to distant markets. By the late 1840s, Cincinnati boasted more than forty pork‐packing plants using an advanced division of labor that integrated packing with slaughtering and dressing. By the end of the Civil War, however, Cincinnati had been displaced as the meatpacking capital by Chicago, strategically located along rail lines linking western livestock supplies to eastern urban markets.

Between 1865 and World War I, meatpacking changed from a mostly local, seasonal, and small‐scale business into a giant, nationally integrated, and year‐round industry dominated by five massive corporations led by Swift's and Armour's. At the heart of this transformation lay Chicago‐based firms' use of refrigerated railroad cars to ship dressed beef from Chicago and other western packing centers to eastern, urban markets. These firms also developed networks of refrigerated branch distribution outlets, deployed armies of salespeople, developed and marketed broad ranges of animal by‐products, and subdivided a mostly unskilled labor force in massive, multispecies packing establishments. Collectively keeping labor costs low and pricing their goods on the basis of average costs rather than supply and demand, they dominated the industry through the 1940s.

After World War II, the advantage shifted to three upstart firms (Con‐Agra, Excell, and especially Iowa Beef Processors) that challenged the older rail‐ and river‐connected packing centers and slaughtered 70 percent of the nation's cattle by 1989. These companies deployed new technologies to eliminate skilled labor, advance the industry's legendary specialization of tasks, and increase productivity. They built single‐species plants closer to livestock supplies and revolutionized the meat trade by trimming red meats to retail specifications within their slaughterhouses and selling the resulting “boxed beef” directly to grocery stores and supermarkets. They undertook an effective campaign against established wage standards, reduced plant safety, sped up production, and recruited nonunion workers from rural areas in the United States, Latin America, and Asia. As the twentieth century ended, the meatpacking and meat‐processing industry remained one of the nation's leading employers, important to the economies of Midwestern and Mid‐Atlantic states as well as Texas and California.

Upton Sinclair's The Jungle (1906), an exposé of labor exploitation and unsanitary conditions in the meatpacking industry, had led to stricter federal regulation. The industry continued, however, to be plagued by charges of labor exploitation, noxious conditions, workplace danger, nutritional risk, and environmental damage.
See also Agriculture; Immigrant Labor; Labor Markets; Livestock Industry; Mass Marketing; Pure Food and Drug Act; Refrigeration and Air Conditioning; Swift, Gustavus.

Bibliography

Jimmy Skaggs , Prime Cut: Livestock Raising and Meatpacking in the United States, 1986.
Roger Horowitz , “Negro and White, Unite and Fight”: A Social History of Industrial Unionism in Meatpacking, 1930–1960, 1997.

Paul Street