The Crying of Lot 49 is a novel written by American author Thomas Pynchon and published in 1965. The shortest of Pynchon's novels, its narrative follows Oedipa Maas, a young Californian woman, who begins to embrace a conspiracy theory as she possibly unearths a centuries-old conflict between two mail distribution companies; one of these companies, Thurn and Taxis, actually existed (1806–1867) and was the first private firm to distribute postal mail. Like most of Pynchon's output, Lot 49 is often described as postmodernist literature. Time included the novel in its "TIME 100 Best English-language Novels from 1923 to 2005".