Libe Slope

The opening of Thomas Pynchon's novel The Crying of Lot 49 (1965) mentions "a sunrise over the library slope at Cornell University that nobody out on it had seen because the slope faces west." Pynchon (b. 1937) spent four years in Ithaca with a break in the middle to serve in the U.S. Navy before graduating from Cornell in 1959. It was at Cornell that he met fellow student and author Richard Fariña, who wrote the popular counterculture novel Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up to Me (1966) based on experiences at Cornell. During Pynchon's sophmore year in 1954-1955, he lived at the base of Cornell's Libe Slope in Mennen Hall.

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