Wanda Tinasky

Wanda Tinasky is the pseudonym of an unknown person whose letters to the editor were regularly printed in local California newspapers from 1983 to 1988 . Her identity has not yet been clarified.

Letters

The first letter appeared in the Mendocino Commentary in April 1983 , and more were later printed in the Anderson Valley Advertiser . In it, Tinasky described herself as a homeless person of Belarusian-Jewish descent over the age of eighty, who lived under the bridges of California's Mendocino County and who also valued the Anderson Valley Advertiser as a substitute for underwear.

The letters were of astonishing literary and humorous quality. Tinasky was obviously very well read (according to her own statement, she had been reading Reader's Digest for 60 years ) and, among other things, spread repeatedly about the theology of Nikolaus von Kues and the inability of local literary greats.

Authorship

Even after the first letters, speculation arose as to who was the author of these letters. Many suspected the reclusive Thomas Pynchon , others the no less audience-shy William Gaddis behind the letters. In fact, Pynchon was probably living in California at the time; the plot of his 1990 novel Vineland is set in the Anderson Valley, among other places. However, he denied his alleged authorship through his agent and wife Melanie Jackson. According to an older rumor that has now been refuted, Gaddis and Pynchon were the same person anyway - Tinasky himself claimed this in a letter dated August 21, 1985.

In 1998, the English language professor Donald Wayne Foster took on the letters. He had previously exposed the Newsweek editor Joe Klein as the author of the anonymous key novel Primary Colors (Eng. With all might ), which deals with the Clinton administration . Foster claimed that the obscure beat writer Tom Hawkins, who died in 1988, was the author of the letters. None of these claims can be conclusively verified to this day.

plant

• The Letters of Wanda Tinasky . Vers Libre Press, 1996, ISBN 0-9652881-0-2 .

Web links

• Who's Writing Whose Writing? Gaddis, Green, Pynchon, and Tinasky (English)
• "Invisible, Inc" ( Memento from November 22, 2001 in the Internet Archive ) - from Lingua Franca , September 1995 (English)
• The Wanda Tinasky Letters Page ( Memento from August 18, 2000 in the Internet Archive )