Wanda Tinasky

Wanda Tinasky, ostensibly a bag lady living under a bridge in the Mendocino County area of Northern California, was the pseudonymous 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 some believe Tinasky to be an obscure Beat Generation poet named Tom Hawkins, though letters ostensibly penned by Tinasky were written after Hawkins' death.

In 1990, Bruce Anderson, the editor of the AVA, read Thomas Pynchon'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.

The situation changed in 1998 when Shakespeare scholar and "literary detective" Don Foster—who had gained publicity by correctly identifying Joe Klein as the author of Primary Colors—figured that an obscure Beat poet and writer, Tom Hawkins, as the author of the letters.

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