English: Photo portrait of American author Thomas Pynchon, age 18, as a U.S. Navy recruit in training. Pynchon served in the Navy between 1955 and 1957. The photo was taken in 1955 for a Navy "cruise book" (i.e., a yearbook) of recruits trained at the Naval Training Center in Bainbridge, Maryland. After boot camp, Pynchon received further training as an electrician in Norfolk, Virginia. In 1956 he was aboard the USS Hank in the Mediterranean during the Suez Crisis.

This was only the second widely published photograph of Pynchon, who has been known throughout his career for steadfast avoidance of the public eye to protect his personal privacy. It was originally published in The Compass, a cruise book of Bainbridge Navy trainees printed by the Atlanta-based publisher Albert Love Enterprises. A typical contemporaneous example edition of The Compass can be seen on the Internet Archive: The Compass (1955), Company 267 (Pynchon was in Company 84). The photo was first republished on the back cover of the dust jacket of David Cowart's 1980 book Thomas Pynchon: The Art of Allusion.

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Sources (see bibliography below for full citations):

• "[Pynchon] has never given an interview and allows no photographs to be released (the only photograph of Pynchon made public, one taken when he was a teen-ager, appeared in New York Magazine on May 13, 1974, and was reprinted in Newsweek the following week.)"

Winston 1975, pp. 279, 285

• "Thomas Pynchon as a trainee at the Bainbridge, Maryland, USN Training Center. Photograph courtesy of Albert Love Enterprises"

Cowart 1980, dust jacket back cover

• "Cowart's jacket presents the second published photo of Pynchon, a Navy shot."

Brivic 1980–1981, p. 599

• General information about Pynchon's Navy experience:

Cowart 2011, p. 3.

• "... [David Foster] Wallace's personal icon [of Pynchon] was presumably the photograph I myself published in 1980: the author as boot camp trainee, taken when he interrupted his undergraduate education for a hitch in the Navy (see the dust jacket of my Thomas Pynchon: The Art of Allusion)."

Cowart 2015, p. 224, fn. 4 (via Google Books)

• "There exist but a few photographs [of Pynchon]: some yearbook pictures from high school and one photograph on the back of the dust jacket of David Cowart's Thomas Pynchon: The Art of Allusion—a mid-1950s shot of Pynchon as a young man dressed in navy uniform. (Unfortunately, many of the libraries holding copies of Cowart's book long ago discarded the jacket.)"

Schaub 2008, p. 4