I always thought that was this guy, who wrote anonymous public letters under the pseudonym Wanda Tianasky, whom people at the time actually thought was a pen name for Pynchon himself
Tom Hawkins[edit]
Main article:
Tom Hawkins (writer)
Thomas Donald Hawkins (January 11, 1927 – September 23, 1988) was born in
Pangurn, Arkansas. He grew up in
Port Angeles, Washington 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 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.[
citation needed]
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.[
citation needed]
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.