Wanda Tinasky
Encyclopedia
Wanda Tinasky, ostensibly a bag lady
living under a bridge in the Mendocino County area of Northern California
, was the pseudonym
ous author of a series of playful, comic and erudite letters sent to the Mendocino Commentary and Anderson Valley Advertiser
between 1983 and 1988. These letters were later collected and published as The Letters of Wanda Tinasky. In them, Tinasky weighs in on a variety of topics - most notably local artists, writers, poets and politicians - with an irreverent wit and literate polish at odds with her apparently straitened circumstances. The harshness of the attacks was deemed excessive by the Commentary early on, and, as a result, most of the remaining letters appeared in the AVA. At the time, the identity of Tinasky was completely unknown, and subject to much local speculation. Tinasky was thought by many to be novelist Thomas Pynchon
, but is now widely believed to be an obscure Beat Generation
poet named Tom Hawkins
.
's Vineland
, a novel set in northern California. Pynchon's style reminded Anderson of Tinasky, and Pynchon's notorious secrecy fueled speculation that he had been in the area during the 1980s. It occurred to Anderson that perhaps Pynchon was Tinasky. Indeed, Tinasky had written that she was writing a novel based on the local scene in Mendocino County.
Similarities (both Tinasky and Pynchon worked for Boeing
) were easy to play up, and discrepancies (Tinasky worked for Boeing ten years before Pynchon) just as easy to play down. This pattern of finding significant matches between Pynchon and Tinasky, while ignoring apparent contradictions, continued in the readings that followed.
Anderson ran his speculations past some Pynchon fans, and received enough encouragement to report in the AVA that Pynchon was Tinasky. This announcement attracted little outside interest.
scholar and "literary detective" Don Foster - who had gained publicity by correctly identifying Joe Klein
as the author of Primary Colors - fingered an obscure Beat
poet and writer, Tom Hawkins, as the author of the letters.
Foster's previous work was based on direct comparisons between unidentified and identified texts, looking for patterns in vocabulary, usage and orthography. Foster's techniques have aroused some controversy, and his results have been mixed.
The Tinasky identification involved more direct detective work, with the crucial step involving computer searches for works written about writers mentioned in the Tinasky letters. Hawkins' name turned up, and Foster then tracked down more information about and writings by Hawkins. Eventually, many minor biographical details appeared which exactly matched the letters: recycled Hawkins poetry was discovered in the letters, and ultimately the very typewriter Hawkins used was found. Unlike the case with Pynchon, where there were both similarities and discrepancies throughout, the identified mismatches between Hawkins and Tinasky were limited to the Tinasky façade, and a small number of "transparent forgeries", as Foster calls them, that had been culled ahead of time.
In 2000, Foster published a popular account in his Author Unknown. It has largely ended academic speculation on Tinasky's identity. Furthermore, several months after Foster's book came out, The Wanda Tinasky Letters page went blank without explanation, and the Letters soon went out of print.
and graduated in 1950 from the University of Washington
with a degree in English. He married Kathleen Marie Gallaner and worked for Boeing
in the early fifties, then in Beaumont, Texas
in television, for station KFDM, and advertising. In 1960 he moved to San Francisco to join the Beats, supporting himself as a postal worker. After his work was rejected by local Beat publications, he took to self-publishing under the name "Tiger Tim" Hawkins. As a fan of William Gaddis
, Hawkins discovered newspaper, the self-published Gaddis fansheet of "jack green
". He became convinced that green was Gaddis, a detail that would show up in the Tinasky letters. Tinasky also claimed that "The novels of William Gaddis and Thomas Pynchon were written by the same person".
After Hawkins retired, he and Kathleen moved to Mendocino County just outside of Fort Bragg, where they lived in poverty for most of the eighties
. Hawkins engaged in petty scams and thefts, and took to disguising himself. Kathleen came into an inheritance and bought a car for herself and a pickup truck for her husband. She also bought a kiln, and began a promising career in pottery.
Three weeks after the last (according to Foster) authentic Tinasky letter, Hawkins bludgeoned Kathleen to death, and kept her body inside their house, unburied. After several days, he set fire to their house and drove her car off a cliff into rocky shoals, killing himself.
At the time, no one connected the end of Tinasky with the Hawkinses' murder-suicide. Indeed, this event didn't altogether stem the flow of Tinasky's invective: at least one "copycat" letter, by Foster's account, had been published while Hawkins was alive, and these continued to trickle out for a short time after his death.
Bag Lady
"Bag Lady" is the first single from singer Erykah Badu's 2000 album Mama's Gun. The song is about a woman trying to begin anew in a relationship, but who has too much emotional "baggage" and can't get close to people. The message of the song is to "pack light" and have hope for the future...
living under a bridge in the Mendocino County area of Northern California
Northern California
Northern California is the northern portion of the U.S. state of California. The San Francisco Bay Area , and Sacramento as well as its metropolitan area are the main population centers...
, was the pseudonym
Pseudonym
A pseudonym is a name that a person assumes for a particular purpose and that differs from his or her original orthonym...
ous author of a series of playful, comic and erudite letters sent to the Mendocino Commentary and Anderson Valley Advertiser
Anderson Valley Advertiser
The Anderson Valley Advertiser is a small but well-known weekly newspaper published in Anderson Valley, California. It was founded in 1955 as a local, community-based paper...
between 1983 and 1988. These letters were later collected and published as The Letters of Wanda Tinasky. In them, Tinasky weighs in on a variety of topics - most notably local artists, writers, poets and politicians - with an irreverent wit and literate polish at odds with her apparently straitened circumstances. The harshness of the attacks was deemed excessive by the Commentary early on, and, as a result, most of the remaining letters appeared in the AVA. At the time, the identity of Tinasky was completely unknown, and subject to much local speculation. Tinasky was thought by many to be novelist Thomas Pynchon
Thomas Pynchon
Thomas Ruggles Pynchon, Jr. is an American novelist. For his most praised novel, Gravity's Rainbow, Pynchon received the National Book Award, and is regularly cited as a contender for the Nobel Prize in Literature...
, but is now widely believed to be an obscure Beat Generation
Beat generation
The Beat Generation refers to a group of American post-WWII writers who came to prominence in the 1950s, as well as the cultural phenomena that they both documented and inspired...
poet named Tom Hawkins
Tom Hawkins (writer)
Thomas Donald Hawkins , who was born in Pangurn, Arkansas and grew up in Port Angeles, Washington, was an American writer who is the probable author of the Wanda Tinasky letters, once widely thought to be the work of novelist Thomas Pynchon.Hawkins graduated in 1950 from the University of...
.
Thomas Pynchon
In 1990, Bruce Anderson, the editor of the AVA, read Thomas PynchonThomas Pynchon
Thomas Ruggles Pynchon, Jr. is an American novelist. For his most praised novel, Gravity's Rainbow, Pynchon received the National Book Award, and is regularly cited as a contender for the Nobel Prize in Literature...
's Vineland
Vineland
Vineland is a 1990 novel by Thomas Pynchon, a postmodern fiction set in California, United States in 1984, the year of Ronald Reagan's re-election...
, a novel set in northern California. Pynchon's style reminded Anderson of Tinasky, and Pynchon's notorious secrecy fueled speculation that he had been in the area during the 1980s. It occurred to Anderson that perhaps Pynchon was Tinasky. Indeed, Tinasky had written that she was writing a novel based on the local scene in Mendocino County.
Similarities (both Tinasky and Pynchon worked for Boeing
Boeing
The Boeing Company is an American multinational aerospace and defense corporation, founded in 1916 by William E. Boeing in Seattle, Washington. Boeing has expanded over the years, merging with McDonnell Douglas in 1997. Boeing Corporate headquarters has been in Chicago, Illinois since 2001...
) were easy to play up, and discrepancies (Tinasky worked for Boeing ten years before Pynchon) just as easy to play down. This pattern of finding significant matches between Pynchon and Tinasky, while ignoring apparent contradictions, continued in the readings that followed.
Anderson ran his speculations past some Pynchon fans, and received enough encouragement to report in the AVA that Pynchon was Tinasky. This announcement attracted little outside interest.
The Letters of Wanda Tinasky
- In 1994, Fred Gardner started a "Best of AVA" project, came upon the Tinasky letters, and learned from Anderson the latter's belief that Pynchon wrote them. Gardner switched to working exclusively on a Tinasky letters project. Receiving a tip that TR Factor (the former Diane Kearney, who appeared in the AVA as "C. O. Jones") might actually be Tinasky, Gardner contacted Factor, and hired her as his assistant.
- In 1995, Gardner sent a letter to Pynchon's agent, Melanie Jackson (by then Pynchon's wife), in regard to the forthcoming publication of the Tinasky letters. Jackson wrote back that Pynchon did not write the letters, and that his name should not be associated with the project. The suggestion was made that Anderson was merely drumming up publicity for himself and the AVA. Gardner did not have as much zeal as Factor after this, and quit the project.
- In 1996, Factor self-published The Letters of Wanda Tinasky with an introduction by a Pynchon scholar supporting the identification of Pynchon with Tinasky, though, under legal duress, the book fell short of making an overt claim of authorship, and did not put Pynchon's name on the cover. The Pynchon community remained largely undecided, and strong opinions formed on both sides, but the issue was mostly ignored. Pynchon Notes, an academic journal, did not review Tinasky.
Don Foster
The situation changed in 1998 when ShakespeareWilliam Shakespeare
William Shakespeare was an English poet and playwright, widely regarded as the greatest writer in the English language and the world's pre-eminent dramatist. He is often called England's national poet and the "Bard of Avon"...
scholar and "literary detective" Don Foster - who had gained publicity by correctly identifying Joe Klein
Joe Klein
Joe Klein is a longtime Washington, D.C. and New York journalist and columnist, known for his novel Primary Colors, an anonymously written roman à clef portraying Bill Clinton's first presidential campaign. Klein is currently a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and is a former Guggenheim...
as the author of Primary Colors - fingered an obscure Beat
Beat generation
The Beat Generation refers to a group of American post-WWII writers who came to prominence in the 1950s, as well as the cultural phenomena that they both documented and inspired...
poet and writer, Tom Hawkins, as the author of the letters.
Foster's previous work was based on direct comparisons between unidentified and identified texts, looking for patterns in vocabulary, usage and orthography. Foster's techniques have aroused some controversy, and his results have been mixed.
The Tinasky identification involved more direct detective work, with the crucial step involving computer searches for works written about writers mentioned in the Tinasky letters. Hawkins' name turned up, and Foster then tracked down more information about and writings by Hawkins. Eventually, many minor biographical details appeared which exactly matched the letters: recycled Hawkins poetry was discovered in the letters, and ultimately the very typewriter Hawkins used was found. Unlike the case with Pynchon, where there were both similarities and discrepancies throughout, the identified mismatches between Hawkins and Tinasky were limited to the Tinasky façade, and a small number of "transparent forgeries", as Foster calls them, that had been culled ahead of time.
In 2000, Foster published a popular account in his Author Unknown. It has largely ended academic speculation on Tinasky's identity. Furthermore, several months after Foster's book came out, The Wanda Tinasky Letters page went blank without explanation, and the Letters soon went out of print.
Tom Hawkins
Thomas Donald Hawkins (January 11, 1927-September 23, 1988) was born in Pangurn, Arkansas. He grew up in Port Angeles, WashingtonPort Angeles, Washington
Port Angeles is a city in and the county seat of Clallam County, Washington, United States. The population was 19,038 at the 2010 census. The area's harbor was dubbed Puerto de Nuestra Señora de los Ángeles by Spanish explorer Francisco de Eliza in 1791, but by the mid-19th century the name had...
and graduated in 1950 from the University of Washington
University of Washington
University of Washington is a public research university, founded in 1861 in Seattle, Washington, United States. The UW is the largest university in the Northwest and the oldest public university on the West Coast. The university has three campuses, with its largest campus in the University...
with a degree in English. He married Kathleen Marie Gallaner and worked for Boeing
Boeing
The Boeing Company is an American multinational aerospace and defense corporation, founded in 1916 by William E. Boeing in Seattle, Washington. Boeing has expanded over the years, merging with McDonnell Douglas in 1997. Boeing Corporate headquarters has been in Chicago, Illinois since 2001...
in the early fifties, then in Beaumont, Texas
Beaumont, Texas
Beaumont is a city in and county seat of Jefferson County, Texas, United States, within the Beaumont–Port Arthur Metropolitan Statistical Area. The city's population was 118,296 at the 2010 census. With Port Arthur and Orange, it forms the Golden Triangle, a major industrial area on the...
in television, for station KFDM, and advertising. In 1960 he moved to San Francisco to join the Beats, supporting himself as a postal worker. After his work was rejected by local Beat publications, he took to self-publishing under the name "Tiger Tim" Hawkins. As a fan of William Gaddis
William Gaddis
William Thomas Gaddis, Jr. was an American novelist. He wrote five novels, two of which won National Book Awards and one of which, The Recognitions , was chosen as one of TIME magazine's 100 best novels from 1923 to 2005...
, Hawkins discovered newspaper, the self-published Gaddis fansheet of "jack green
Jack Green
Jack Green is a British musician.Green played with T. Rex between 1973 and 1974, then with The Pretty Things between 1974 and 1976. After Phil May walked out on the Pretty Things he carried on with Peter Tolson, Gordon Edwards and Skip Allen in Metropolis...
". He became convinced that green was Gaddis, a detail that would show up in the Tinasky letters. Tinasky also claimed that "The novels of William Gaddis and Thomas Pynchon were written by the same person".
After Hawkins retired, he and Kathleen moved to Mendocino County just outside of Fort Bragg, where they lived in poverty for most of the eighties
1980s
File:1980s decade montage.png|thumb|400px|From left, clockwise: The first Space Shuttle, Columbia, lifted off in 1981; American President Ronald Reagan and Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev eased tensions between the two superpowers, leading to the end of the Cold War; The Fall of the Berlin Wall in...
. Hawkins engaged in petty scams and thefts, and took to disguising himself. Kathleen came into an inheritance and bought a car for herself and a pickup truck for her husband. She also bought a kiln, and began a promising career in pottery.
Three weeks after the last (according to Foster) authentic Tinasky letter, Hawkins bludgeoned Kathleen to death, and kept her body inside their house, unburied. After several days, he set fire to their house and drove her car off a cliff into rocky shoals, killing himself.
At the time, no one connected the end of Tinasky with the Hawkinses' murder-suicide. Indeed, this event didn't altogether stem the flow of Tinasky's invective: at least one "copycat" letter, by Foster's account, had been published while Hawkins was alive, and these continued to trickle out for a short time after his death.
External links
- Who's Writing Whose Writing? Gaddis, Green, Pynchon, and Tinasky
- "Invisible, Inc" - Lingua Franca, September/October 1995
- The Wanda Tinasky Letters Page - archive.orgInternet ArchiveThe Internet Archive is a non-profit digital library with the stated mission of "universal access to all knowledge". It offers permanent storage and access to collections of digitized materials, including websites, music, moving images, and nearly 3 million public domain books. The Internet Archive...
, August 18, 2000