Mason & Dixon is a 1997 postmodern historical novel by Thomas Pynchon. It chronicles the unlikely partnership between English astronomer Charles Mason and surveyor Jeremiah Dixon, who journey from the Cape of Good Hope to the American frontier to draw the famous boundary dividing Pennsylvania and Maryland—the Mason-Dixon Line. Narrated as a memoir by the Reverend Wicks Cherrycoke in sprawling eighteenth-century prose, the novel blends history with fantasy: talking dogs, mechanical ducks, and Chinese geomancers populate its pages. Beneath the comedy lies a profound meditation on science, empire, slavery, and humanity's obsession with drawing lines across the world.
