Mason & Dixon

Mason & Dixon is a postmodernist novel by the American author Thomas Pynchon, published in 1997. It presents a fictionalized account of the collaboration between Charles Mason and Jeremiah Dixon in their astronomical and surveying exploits in the Dutch Cape Colony, Saint Helena, Great Britain and along the Mason-Dixon line in British North America on the eve of the Revolutionary War in the United States.

The novel, written in a style based on late-18th-century English, is a frame narrative told from the focal point of Rev. Wicks Cherrycoke, a clergyman of dubious orthodoxy who, on a cold December evening in 1786, attempts to entertain and divert his extended family (partly for amusement, and partly to keep his coveted status as a guest in the house) by telling a tall tale version of Mason and Dixon's biographies (claiming to have accompanied Mason and Dixon throughout their journeys).