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/* Early career */
From the mid-1960s Pynchon has also regularly provided blurbs and introductions for a wide range of novels and non-fiction works. One of the first of these pieces was a brief review of Hall's ''Warlock'' which appeared, along with comments by seven other writers on "neglected books", as part of a feature entitled "A Gift of Books" in the December 1965 issue of ''Holiday.''
In April 1964, Pynchon wrote to his agent, Candida Donadio, that he was facing a creative crisis, with four novels in progress, and that ''If they come out on paper anything like they are inside my head then it will be the literary event of the millennium.''<ref>Gussow 1998</ref> In December 1965, Pynchon politely turned down an offer to teach literature at Bennington College, writing that he had resolved, two or three years earlier, to write three novels at once.<ref>McLemee 2006</ref> Pynchon called the decision “a moment of temporary insanity,” but noted that he was “too stubborn to let any of them go, let alone all of them.” Pynchon's second novel, ''The Crying of Lot 49,'' was published a few months later in 1966. Whether ''The Crying of Lot 49'' was one of the three or four novels Pynchon had in progress is unknown.
''The Crying of Lot 49'' won the Richard and Hilda Rosenthal Foundation Award shortly after publication. Although more concise and linear in its structure than Pynchon's other novels, its labyrinthine plot features an ancient, underground mail service known as "The Tristero" or "Trystero," a parody of a [[revenge play|Jacobean revenge drama]] entitled "The Courier's Tragedy," and a corporate conspiracy involving the bones of [[World War II]] American GIs being used as charcoal cigarette filters. It proposes a series of seemingly incredible interconnections between these and other similarly bizarre revelations that confront the novel's protagonist, Oedipa Maas. Like ''V,'' the novel contains a wealth of references to science and technology and to obscure historical events, and both books dwell upon the detritus of American society and culture. ''The Crying of Lot 49'' also continues Pynchon's habit of composing parodic song lyrics and punning names, and referencing aspects of popular culture within his prose narrative. In particular, it incorporates several allusions to the Beatles and Nabokov's ''Lolita.''
