When published in 1973, Gravity's Rainbow expanded our sense of what the novel could be. Pynchon's extensive references to modern science, history and culture challenged any reader, while his prose bent the rules for narrative art and his satirical practises taunted U.S. obscenity and pornography statutes. His writing thus enacts freedom even as the book's great theme is domination: humanity's diminished "chances for freedom" in a global military-industrial system birthed and set on its feet in World War II. Its symbol: the V-2 rocket. Gravity's Rainbow, Domination, and Freedom broadly situates Pynchon's novel in "long sixties" history, revealing a fiction deeply of and about its time. Herman and Weisenburger put the novel's abiding questions about freedom in context with sixties struggles against war, restricted speech rights, ethno-racial oppression, environmental degradation and subtle new means of social and psychological control. They show the text's close indebtedness to critiques of domination by key postwar thinkers such as Erich Fromm, Herbert Marcuse and Hannah Arendt. They detail equally powerful ways that sixties countercultural practises - free-speech resistance played out in courts, campuses, city streets and raucously satirical underground presswork - provide a clearer bearing on Pynchon's own satirical practises and their implicit criticisms. If the System has jacketed humanity in a total domination, may not a solitary individual still assert freedom? Or has the System captured all - even supposedly immune elites - in an irremediable dominion? Reading Pynchon's main characters and storylines, this study realises a darker Gravity's Rainbow than critics have been willing to see.

The first in-depth historical account of the events that inspired Toni Morrison's novel Beloved.

In the middle of a frigid Sunday night in January 1856, a twenty-two-year-old Kentucky slave named Margaret Garner gathered up her family and raced north, toward Cincinnati and freedom. But Margaret's master followed just hours behind and soon had the fugitives surrounded. Thinking all was lost, Margaret seized a butcher knife and nearly decapitated her two-year-old daughter, crying out that she would rather see her children dead than returned to slavery. She was turning on her other three children when slave catchers burst in and subdued her.

Margaret Garner's child-murder electrified the United States, inspiring the longest, most spectacular fugitive-slave trial in history. Abolitionists and slaveholders fought over the meaning of the murder, and the case came to symbolize the ills of the Union in those last dark decades before the Civil War. Newspaper columnists, poets, and dramatists raced to interpret Margaret's deeds, but by the century's end they were all but forgotten. Steven Weisenburger is the first scholar to delve into this astonishing story in more than a century. Weisenburger integrates his innovative archival discoveries into a dramatic narrative that paints a nuanced portrait of the not-so-genteel Southern culture of slavery and its destructive effect on all who lived in and with it.

When published in 1973, Gravity's Rainbow expanded our sense of what the novel could be. Pynchon's extensive references to modern science, history and culture challenged any reader, while his prose bent the rules for narrative art and his satirical practises taunted U.S. obscenity and pornography statutes. His writing thus enacts freedom even as the book's great theme is domination: humanity's diminished "chances for freedom" in a global military-industrial system birthed and set on its feet in World War II. Its symbol: the V-2 rocket. Gravity's Rainbow, Domination, and Freedom broadly situates Pynchon's novel in "long sixties" history, revealing a fiction deeply of and about its time. Herman and Weisenburger put the novel's abiding questions about freedom in context with sixties struggles against war, restricted speech rights, ethno-racial oppression, environmental degradation and subtle new means of social and psychological control. They show the text's close indebtedness to critiques of domination by key postwar thinkers such as Erich Fromm, Herbert Marcuse and Hannah Arendt. They detail equally powerful ways that sixties countercultural practises - free-speech resistance played out in courts, campuses, city streets and raucously satirical underground presswork - provide a clearer bearing on Pynchon's own satirical practises and their implicit criticisms. If the System has jacketed humanity in a total domination, may not a solitary individual still assert freedom? Or has the System captured all - even supposedly immune elites - in an irremediable dominion? Reading Pynchon's main characters and storylines, this study realises a darker Gravity's Rainbow than critics have been willing to see.

Adding some 20 percent to the original content, this is a completely updated edition of the indispensable guide to Thomas Pynchon's ""Gravity's Rainbow"". Steven Weisenburger takes the reader page by page, often line by line, through the welter of historical references, scientific data, cultural fragments, anthropological research, jokes, and puns around which Pynchon wove his story. Weisenburger fully annotates Pynchon's use of languages ranging from Russian and Hebrew to such subdialects of English as 1940s street talk, drug lingo, and military slang as well as the more obscure terminology of black magic, Rosicrucianism, and Pavlovian psychology. The Companion also reveals the underlying organization of ""Gravity's Rainbow"" - how the book's myriad references form patterns of meaning and structure that have eluded both admirers and critics of the novel. The Companion is keyed to the pages of the principal American editions of ""Gravity's Rainbow"": Viking/Penguin (1973), Bantam (1974), and the special, repaginated Penguin paperback (2000) honoring the novel as one of twenty ""Great Books of the Twentieth Century.