Mason & Dixon facts for kids

Mason & Dixon

First edition cover
Author	Thomas Pynchon
Cover artist	Raquel Jaramillo
Country	United States
Language	English
Genre	Postmodern novel, historical novel, biography
Published	1997 (Henry Holt and Company)
Media type	Print (hardback and paperback)
Pages	773
ISBN	0-8050-3758-6
OCLC	36430653
Dewey Decimal	813/.54 21
LC Class	PS3566.Y55 M37 1997

Mason & Dixon is a postmodernist novel by American author Thomas Pynchon, published in 1997. It presents a fictionalized account of the collaboration between Charles Mason and Jeremiah Dixon in their astronomical and surveying exploits in the Dutch Cape Colony, Saint Helena, Great Britain and along the Mason-Dixon line in British North America on the eve of the Revolutionary War in the United States.

The novel, written in a style based on late 18th century English is a frame narrative told from the focal point of Rev. Wicks Cherrycoke, a clergyman of dubious orthodoxy who, on a cold December evening in 1786, attempts to entertain and divert his extended family (partly for amusement, and partly to keep his coveted status as a guest in the house) by telling a tall tale version of Mason and Dixon's biographies (claiming to have accompanied Mason and Dixon throughout their journeys).

Legacy

Pynchon's work is part of the metahistorical romance genre evaluated by Amy J. Elias in Sublime Desire: History and Post-1960s Fiction.

Mark Knopfler wrote a song about the book called "Sailing to Philadelphia,” originally performed as a duet with James Taylor.