Thomas Pynchon was born in 1937. He has written other books, his most famous of which being V. He attended Cornell University and even went to lectures by famous Lolita author Vladimir Nabokov. This would go on to influence some of his fiction.

To understand this book you have to understand that it was based on the culture of the sixties and seventies. This culture was heavily influenced by drugs, music and emerging status of Hollywood. Pynchon made The Crying of Lot 49 to be a satire on the current culture he was experiencing. The drugs were directly addressed by the book. Oedipa's doctor recommends that she take LSD to ease her depression a fact balked upon by the main character. This is somewhat making fun of the doctors who thought this remedy would help but lost their patients even more to it. Music was another big subject of satire in this book. He makes comments about the music and famous musical figures of the time by introducing us to the "Paranoids" a band eerily similar to the Beatles. They are pot smoking, lazy, girl crazed, members of a popular band. I think by this he was trying to put a funny play on the Beatles but also showing how obsessed people became with people who were easily relate able to us. He also addresses the "Hollywood Culture" and it's status at the time. The place in California that they live is called "San Narcisso" a play on the word narcissist or someone who is obsessed with themselves. Here he shows us his view on some of the people of that time and gives the impression that they were only into themselves, and did not care for the well being of other people. These three topics give a greater meaning to his novel, when you see he was trying to put a humorous criticism of the 60s 70s culture.