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/* Childhood and education */
===Childhood and education===
Pynchon attended Oyster Bay High School, where he was awarded "student of the year" and contributed short fictional pieces to his school newspaper: "Voice of the Hamster" [http://themodernword.com/pynchon/pynchon_hamster.html], "The Boys" [http://www.themodernword.com/pynchon/pynchon_boys.html], and "Ye Legend of Sir Stupid and the Purple Knight" [http://www.themodernword.com/pynchon/pynchon_knight.html]. These works featured many of the themes and literary devices he would use throughout his career: silly names, rampant drug use, and paranoia. After graduating in 1953 at the age of 16, he studied engineering physics at [[Cornell University]], but left at the end of his second year to serve in the [[United States Navy|U.S. Navy]]. In 1957, Pynchon returned to Cornell to pursue a degree in English. His first published story, "The Small Rain", appeared in the ''Cornell Writer'' in May 1959, and narrates an actual experience of a friend who had served in the [[United States Army|army]]; subsequently, however, episodes and characters throughout Pynchon's fiction draw freely upon his own experiences in the navy.
While at Cornell, Pynchon became a friend of [[Richard Fariña]], and both briefly led what Pynchon has called a "micro-cult" around Oakley Hall's [[1958 in literature|1958]] novel ''[[Warlock (novel)|Warlock]]''. (He later reminisced about his college days in the introduction he wrote in 1983 for Fariña's novel ''[[Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up to Me]],'' first published in 1966.) Pynchon also reportedly attended lectures given by [[Vladimir Nabokov]], who then taught literature at Cornell. While Nabokov later said that he had no memory of Pynchon (although Nabokov's wife, Vera, who graded her husband's class papers, commented that she remembered his distinctive handwriting; his later handwriting appears unexceptional), other teachers at Cornell, like the novelist James McConkey, recall him as being a gifted and exceptional student. Pynchon received his BA in June 1959.
