Why read Mason & Dixon?

Book cover of Mason & Dixon

Book description

Charles Mason (1728 -1786) and Jeremiah Dixon (1733-1779) were the British Surveyors best remembered for running the boundary between Pennsylvania and Maryland that we know today as the Mason-Dixon Line. Here is their story as re-imagined by Thomas Pynchon, in an updated eighteenth-century novel featuring Native Americans and frontier folk,…

Explore

Topics

The Age of Enlightenment

Genres

When you buy books, we may earn a commission that helps keep our lights on (or join the rebellion as a member).

Why read it?

1 author picked Mason & Dixon as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?

Steve Tomasula

Author

I love this novel’s lush language, its wordplay, and the fun of the story. Pynchon’s descriptions of nature are reminiscent of Bierstadt’s paintings of nature as a sacred space. Combine this with the density of detail about science, cartography, and America in the late 1700s, and what results is a complex telling of the creation of a line with huge consequences, such as its use to define the North and the South during the Civil War.

Pynchon’s irony and satire imply more than what is said, using map-making, to cite just one example, as a way to talk about how…

From Steve's list on Groundbreaking books on the invention of nature.