NEW YORK—It’s been a guessing game that has fascinated the book world all week: Did Thomas Pynchon write a campus farce called “Cow Country” and publish it in April under the pseudonym Adrian Jones Pearson?
The question was first raised in Harper’s magazine, which on Wednesday ran a long essay by the respected critic Art Winslow, who called the 540-page book “side-splittingly funny” and found enough similarities to Pynchon to make it plausible that the media-adverse author of “Gravity’s Rainbow” had also written “Cow Country.” Winslow, the former literary editor of The Nation, concluded that “an extremely confident sensibility is in control, one neither unpracticed nor hesitant.”
A sensibility that could belong to a writer as enigmatic and as playful as Thomas Pynchon.
But the real author, apparently, is far less known. The Associated Press traced the book’s publisher, Cow Eye Press, to a Western U.S. address and determined it was written by Anthony Perry, who as A.J. Perry previously wrote “Twelve Stories of Russia: A Novel, I Guess.” The AP then confirmed Perry’s identity with the literary scholar Steven Moore, who contributed a blurb to “Cow Country.” Moore, whose books include a two-volume history of the novel, said he has been in touch with Perry.
Responding by email to the AP, Perry declined to say whether he was Pearson, but did say that he believed “the author is superfluous to his work.”
“I’ve been saying this for a long time, in fact ... long before Pearson took up the cause,” he wrote. “The focus should be on the texts, not the author, because the texts will always tell the truth.”
