Thomas Pynchon leaves his Manhattan apartment building; he's wearing a pair of jeans and comfortable shoes. He, of course, looks much older than his pictures; the last one anybody has ever seen was taken in 1955, when he was in the Navy. He'll be 60 next year, and his hair has gone gray. He keeps it long, and has a white mustache and beard. It appears that his famous snaggle of teeth has been fixed. He wears glasses. His eyes, shadowed in dark in those few early photographs, are blue. Thomas Pynchon walks down a New York City street in the middle of the morning. He has a light gait. He floats along. He looks canny and whimsical, like he'd be fun to talk to; but, of course, he's not talking. It's a drizzling day, and the writer doesn't have an umbrella. He's carrying his own shopping bag, a canvas tote like one of those giveaways from public radio. He makes a quick stop in a health-food store, buys some health foods. He leaves the store, but just outside, as if something had just occurred to him, he turns around slowly and walks to the window. Then, he peers in, frankly observing the person who may be observing him. It's raining harder now. He hurries home. For the past half-dozen years, Thomas Pynchon, the most famous literary recluse of our time, has been living openly in a city of 8 million people and going unnoticed, like the rest of us.

Ask people in Pynchon's own neighborhood where they think he might be hiding out, and you get a variety of responses: "He lives in Mexico," says a clerk in a bookstore a few blocks from his building.

"Out west somewhere," says a salesperson in a gourmet-coffee store around the corner.

"He's disappeared, and no one will ever find him, because that's how he wants it," says a man walking past the entrance to Pynchon's apartment building.

Since 1963, when Pynchon's first novel, V., came out, the writer—widely considered America's most important novelist since World War II—has become an almost mythical figure, a kind o...