Wanda Tinasky, ostensibly a bag lady living under a bridge in the Mendocino County area of Northern California, is the pseudonymous author of a series of playful, comic and dizzyingly literate letters sent to the Mendocino Commentary and Anderson Valley Advertiser between 1983 and 1988. These epistles 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, poets and politicians - with a rapier wit and precision-tooled prose at odds with her apparently straitened circumstances.
Perhaps fueled by the conspicuously professional polish of the letters, the rumor quickly spread that they were written by a certain polyglot polymath thought to have been in the area at the time, namely Thomas Pynchon (who, it was conjectured, was then working on his Californian opus, Vineland). Pynchon, through his wife and agent, Melanie Jackson, denied this charge, but like the Ted L. Nancy = Jerry Seinfeld equation, it seems to have served the publishers of the material well, and, as the author apparently wished to remain anonymous, there seems to have been little momentum behind the revision of this received "wisdom".
That changed in 1998 when Shakespeare scholar and self-styled literary detective Donald Foster - who had previously "outed" Joe Klein as the author of Primary Colors, as well as corroborating David Kaczynski's claim that his brother, Ted, was the author of the Unabomber manifesto - fingered Tom Hawkins as the smoking pen. Hawkins, a Beat author and former postal worker, whose life was tragically cut short in a lurid cocktail of murder and suicide, was no stranger to literary gamesmanship, having dabbled in an older authorial mystery surrounding the author William Gaddis and his evangelist, Jack Green. Though Green denied it, Hawkins was convinced that he and Gaddis were the same person. Indeed, Tinasky shed more dark on the matter by opining, in a letter published in the Anderson Valley Advertiser on 21 August 1985, that: "The novels of William Gaddis and Thomas Pynchon were written by the same person".
The Tinasky identity appears, according to Foster's account, to have been the victim of further heists: a local poet apparently threw a disgruntled fake Tinasky missive into the mix on 11 November 1986, and other "copycat" letters, which had already started to appear while Hawkins was still alive, continued to trickle out for a short time after his death on 23 September 1988.
It is worth noting that Foster's credentials, while impressive, are not altogether impeccable. He played a key role in the JonBenét Ramsey murder case, but appears to have offered his services to both sides. In addition, the Shakespeare sleuthing which first thrust him into the public eye was later recanted by Foster himself (the allegedly Shakespearean Funeral Elegy was re-attributed to John Ford).
Given that Hawkins, like Gaddis, and unlike Pynchon, is no longer around to deny or confirm the attribution, it may be that the most pragmatic policy is to read the letters on their own terms: as a collection of mischievous, erudite and humorous reflections on Mendocino County life written by an author who delighted in the mystery of anonymity.
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