The Chums of Chance Reading List (Thomas Pynchon’s Against the Day)

Titles of The Chums of Chance books mentioned in Thomas Pynchon’s Against the Day:

• The Chums of Chance and the Evil Halfwit
• The Chums of Chance and the Curse of the Great Kahuna
• The Chums of Chance and the Ice Pirates
• The Chums of Chance Nearly Crash into the Kremlin
• The Chums of Chance and the Caged Women of Yokohama
• The Chums of Chance and the Wrath of the Yellow Fang
• The Chums of Chance at Krakatoa
• The Chums of Chance Search for Atlantis
• The Chums of Chance in Old Mexico
• The Chums of Chance in the Bowels of the Earth
• The Chums of Chance at the Ends of the Earth

The Chums of Chance bits have been some of my favorites in Pynchon’s Against the Day, and have given me more than one occasion to riff. There’s something wonderfully generative (and even generous) about these pulpy, romantic titles—an invitation to daydream, to fly with the boys a bit.

The painting of the airship at the top is by Harry Grant Dart, whose comic strip The Explorigator undoubtedly influenced Pynchon’s vision of The Chums of Chance. You can perhaps glean some of that inspiration in this 1908 broadside: