id	author	title	date	pages	extension	mime	words	sentences	flesch	summary	cache	txt
en-wikipedia-org-282		The Crying of Lot 49 - Wikipedia			.html	text/html	3384	315	72	The Crying of Lot 49 is a novel written by American author Thomas Pynchon and published in 1965. The shortest of Pynchon's novels, its narrative follows Oedipa Maas, a young Californian woman, who begins to embrace a conspiracy theory as she possibly unearths a centuries-old conflict between two mail distribution companies; only one of these companies, Thurn and Taxis, actually existed (1806–1867) and was the first private firm to distribute postal mail. Pynchon described in the prologue to his 1984 collection Slow Learner an "up-and-down shape of my learning curve" as a writer, and specifically does not believe he maintained a "positive or professional direction" in the writing of The Crying of Lot 49, "which was marketed as a 'novel', and in which I seem to have forgotten most of what I thought I'd learned up until then."[4]	./cache/en-wikipedia-org-282.html	./txt/en-wikipedia-org-282.txt