Thomas Pynchon has so carefully guarded his privacy that relatively little is known for certain about his personal life. He evidently prefers to have readers focus on his fiction rather than on himself. His principled determination to avoid personal publicity has led to his routinely, but inaccurately, being described as a recluse, has sparked some bizarre rumors – that he was J. D. Salinger, or the Unabomber – and has provoked some spiteful and self-serving revelations. After defying the norms of celebrity culture for decades, Pynchon does seem to have let down his guard a bit: In 2004 he mocked his own reputation as a “reclusive author” by voicing a caricature of himself with a brown paper bag over his head in two episodes of The Simpsons, and in 2009 he narrated a promotional video for his novel Inherent Vice.