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Drawing on archival sources, I argue that the 1962 Seattle World’s Fair (also known as Century 21) was an important source for Thomas Pynchon’s surreal depictions of the Raketen-Stadt in Gravity’s Rainbow. Accounts of the influence of Seattle on Pynchon have been limited to his work as a Boeing technical writer, and Century 21 goes unmentioned in work on the novel’s allusions by Steven Weisenburger and others. Pynchon responds throughout Gravity’s Rainbow to Century 21, particularly its Cold War views of space-age futurism and nuclear weapons. I draw new connections between the angel of Lübeck and John Glenn’s World’s Fair appearance; aspects of the Raketen-Stadt and the fair’s US Science Pavilion; and Pynchon’s many towers and elevators and that signature feature of Century 21, the Space Needle. The conclusion attends to the fair’s traces in Against the Day and Bleeding Edge, demonstrating Pynchon’s nearly career-long fascination with the event.

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The Broom of the System offers a covert dialogue with Reagan’s consolidation of the neoliberal agenda around a revived version of the Protestant call to work in the 1980s, driven by fears of the effects of a service economy. I unpack this novel’s preoccupation with work, other (less reliable) forms of creating and accruing value, and connected issues of language use: my foci include the leisure-based national literature represented by Rick Vigorous, the ersatz topoi of Protestantism and self-reliance embodied by Governor Zusatz and Reverend Sykes, and the countering force of Lenore Beadsman, importantly named (in what I show to be Wallace’s continual play with initials) for the pound, unit of weight, currency, and work. Lenore is associated with value, clarity, ground, the balance scale of justice, and, in a key early image of contingency in art, the miraculous value of lottery tickets.