File:Thomas Pynchon, Navy Sailor.jpg

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Description
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.

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
Date
English: Photo taken in 1955, possibly early 1956.
Source
English: *Original source: The Compass cruise book (United States Naval Training Center Bainbridge, Maryland Company 84), Albert Love Enterprises
  • Instant source: Photo reprinted (at approx. 3 in. × 4.5 in.) on the back cover of dust jacket of Cowart, David (1980) Thomas Pynchon: The Art of Allusion, Southern Illinois University Press ISBN: 0-8093-0944-0. . Scanned at 600dpi from an original dust jacket and retouched; see upload history for original scan without retouching.
Author
English: Published by Albert Love Enterprises, a publisher based in Atlanta, Georgia. Photographer unknown; probably a work-for-hire employee of Albert Love Enterprises, possibly an employee of the US Navy.
Permission
(Reusing this file)
English: The photo is in the public domain for all of the following reasons:
  1. The Compass appears to have been a publication by a private company, not an official publication by the Navy or US federal government, and as such it may have been subject to copyright protection at some time in the past. Nevertheless, it is a public domain work now due to the publisher's failure to file for renewal with the US Copyright Office.
  2. The image is a purely mechanical scan/photocopy of the original photograph and does not qualify for independent copyright protection.

The photo was first published in 1955 or 1956 by Albert Love Enterprises, a private company—not the Navy itself, nor any other department of the US federal government. According to Ancestry Library:

"Cruise books are yearbook-style books put together by volunteers on board ship to commemorate a deployment. They usually include portraits of the sailors, officers, and other personnel aboard the ship, accompanied by the individual's surname and naval rate... Cruise books are created for private distribution. They are not official Navy publications, and the Navy does not stock, sell, or republish these books." (from "About U.S. Navy Cruise Books, 1918–2009" – subscription required)

(A more complete understanding of the relationship between Albert Love Enterprises and the Navy may reveal that these cruise books are Navy works in whole or in part; relevant factors could include, for example, the contractual relationship between the two parties or the use of Navy resources/personnel in the production of the cruise books. Nevertheless, without further information it is better to err on the side of caution and assume that it is not "a work prepared by an officer or employee of the United States Government as part of that person's official duties.")

Regardless, the cruise book is in the public domain because it was published in the United States prior to 1964 and its copyright term was not renewed with the United States Copyright Office. Assuming it was ever a copyrighted work in the first place, its copyright term expired by 1984, 28 years after initial publication. See the Copyright Catalog (1978 to present).
Bibliography
InfoField
  • Brivic, David (1980–1981). "Review of Thomas Pynchon: The Art of Allusion and Pynchon's Fictions: Thomas Pynchon and the Literature of Information". Journal of Modern Literature 8 (3–4): 599–600. Indiana University Press. JSTOR 3831333.
  • Cowart, David (1980) Thomas Pynchon: The Art of Allusion, Southern Illinois University Press ISBN: 0-8093-0944-0.
  • Cowart, David (2011) Thomas Pynchon & The Dark Passages in History, University of Georgia Press ISBN: 978-0-8203-3709-8.
  • Cowart, David (2015) The Tribe of Pyn: Literary Generations in the Postmodern Period, University of Michigan Press ISBN: 978-0-472-12144-1.
  • Schaub, Thomas H. (2008) "Part One: Materials" in Approaches to Teaching Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49 and Other Works, Modern Language Association of America ISBN: 0-87352-813-1.
  • Winston, Mathew (October 1975). "The Quest for Pynchon". Twentieth Century Literature 21 (3): 278–287. Duke University Press. JSTOR 440565
This is a retouched picture, which means that it has been digitally altered from its original version. Modifications made by Blz 2049.

Licensing

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This image is in the public domain because it is a mere mechanical scan or photocopy of a public domain original, or – from the available evidence – is so similar to such a scan or photocopy that no copyright protection can be expected to arise. The original itself is in the public domain for the following reason:
Public domain
This work is in the public domain because it was published in the United States between 1929 and 1963, and although there may or may not have been a copyright notice, the copyright was not renewed. For further explanation, see Commons:Hirtle chart and the copyright renewal logs.
Note that it may still be copyrighted in jurisdictions that do not apply the rule of the shorter term for US works (depending on the date of the author's death), such as Canada (70 years p.m.a.), Mainland China (50 years p.m.a., not Hong Kong or Macao), Germany (70 years p.m.a.), Mexico (100 years p.m.a.), Switzerland (70 years p.m.a.), and other countries with individual treaties.

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File history

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Date/TimeThumbnailDimensionsUserComment
current22:34, 1 July 2020Thumbnail for version as of 22:34, 1 July 20201,782 × 2,679 (1.49 MB)Blz 2049 (talk | contribs)Retouch by uploader to reduce minor scratches/damage, improve exposure/contrast, reduce noise
22:32, 1 July 2020Thumbnail for version as of 22:32, 1 July 20201,782 × 2,679 (2.2 MB)Blz 2049 (talk | contribs)High-res scan from the Cowart 1980 dust jacket
02:46, 23 June 2020Thumbnail for version as of 02:46, 23 June 2020137 × 206 (9 KB)Blz 2049 (talk | contribs)== {{int:filedesc}} == {{Information |Description={{en|1=Photo ID portrait of American author Thomas Pynchon, approx. age 18–20, as a U.S. Navy sailor. He attended boot camp at the Naval Training Center in Bainbridge, Maryland before receiving advanced training in Norfolk, Virginia. In 1956 he was aboard the USS ''Hank'' during the Suez Crisis. This was only the second published photog...

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