A sprawling, complex, and comic work from one of the country"s most celebrated and idiosyncratic authors, Mason & Dixon is Thomas Pynchon"s Most Magickal reinvention of the 18th-century novel. It follows the lifelong partnership and adventures of the English surveyors Charles Mason and Jeremiah Dixon (of Mason-Dixon Line fame) as they travel the world mapping and measuring through an uncharted pre-Revolutionary America of Native Americans, white settlers, taverns, and bawdy establishments of ill-repute. Fans of the postmodern master of paranoia will recognize Pynchon"s personality in the novel"s first phrase: "Snow-Balls have flown their Arcs," a brief echo of the rockets that curve across the skies in the writer"s masterpiece Gravity"s Rainbow.