Kennebeck denied that the layout was intentional, and later editions of the novel separate the segments with only one square. The squares, however, were inserted by Edwin Kennebeck, an editor at the book's original publisher, Viking Press. Many readers, reviewers, and scholars, such as Richard Poirier, have suggested that the squares resemble the film perforations known as 'sprocket holes' that engage with the teeth in a film camera or projector to advance the strip of film. In the original editions of the book, the episodes were separated by a row of seven small squares. Gravity's Rainbow is composed of four parts, each segmented into a number of episodes. Fariña had died in a motorcycle accident in 1966.

Pynchon had been a good friend of Fariña, a folk singer and novelist, since they had attended Cornell University together. Gravity's Rainbow carries the dedication 'For Richard Fariña'. million bureaucrats are diligently plotting death and some of them even know it Time named Gravity's Rainbow one of its 'All-Time 100 Greatest Novels', a list of the best English-language novels from 1923 to 2005 and it is considered by many critics to be one of the greatest American novels ever written. The novel was nominated for the 1973 Nebula Award for Best Novel. No Pulitzer Prize was awarded for fiction that year. Although selected by the Pulitzer Prize jury on fiction for the 1974 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, the Pulitzer Advisory Board was offended by its content, some of which was described as ''unreadable,' 'turgid,' 'overwritten' and in parts 'obscene' '. It shared the 1974 US National Book Award for Fiction with A Crown of Feathers and Other Stories by Isaac Bashevis Singer. Traversing a wide range of knowledge, Gravity's Rainbow crosses boundaries between high and low culture, between literary propriety and profanity, and between science and speculative metaphysics.

In particular, it features the quest undertaken by several characters to uncover the secret of a mysterious device, the Schwarzgerät ('black device'), which is slated to be installed in a rocket with the serial number '00000'. The narrative is set primarily in Europe at the end of World War II and centers on the design, production and dispatch of V-2 rockets by the German military. Gravity's Rainbow is a 1973 novel by American writer Thomas Pynchon.

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