Departures of note

Tom Hawkins, a writer who spent years on the fringes of the literary world, is now remembered as the probable author of the Wanda Tinasky letters—a series of playful, erudite, and often scathing letters published in small Mendocino County newspapers between 1983 and 1988. Written under the guise of a bag lady living under a bridge, the letters were widely speculated to be the work of novelist Thomas Pynchon. But after Hawkins's death, literary detective Don Foster used textual analysis to build a strong case that Hawkins was the true author, a conclusion sealed when the buyer of Hawkins's former home discovered correspondence and personal papers that matched the letters' style and obsessions.

Hawkins's path to this strange legacy began in Pangburn, Arkansas, and grew up in Port Angeles, Washington. He graduated from the University of Washington in 1950 with a degree in English, then worked for Boeing and later in television and advertising in Beaumont, Texas. In 1960, he moved to San Francisco to join the Beat movement, supporting himself as a postal worker. When local Beat publications rejected his work, he turned to self-publishing under names like 'Tiger Tim' Hawkins, producing fanzines and pamphlets through his own Ahab Press. A devoted fan of William Gaddis, Hawkins became convinced that Gaddis and the obscure writer 'jack green' were the same person—a claim he repeated in the Tinasky letters, where he also insisted that Gaddis and green had written all of Pynchon's novels.

After retiring, Hawkins and his wife Kathleen moved to Mendocino County, where they lived in poverty throughout most of the 1980s. Hawkins engaged in petty scams and thefts, often disguising himself, while Kathleen pursued a promising career in pottery after receiving a small inheritance. In September 1988, three weeks after the last authentic Tinasky letter, Hawkins bludgeoned Kathleen to death, kept her body in their house for several days, then set the house on fire and drove her car off a cliff, killing himself. At the time, no one connected the end of the Tinasky letters with the murder-suicide, and copycat letters continued to appear for a short while afterward.

Hawkins's published works—including Eve, the Common Muse of Henry Miller & Lawrence Durrell (1963) and Paul Krassner, The Realist, & $crap (1963)—show the same distinctive use of ampersands and postscripts that marked the Tinasky letters. His identity as Tinasky was not confirmed until after his death, when Foster's investigation, aided by the discovery of Hawkins's personal papers, made the case public. Today, Hawkins is remembered less for his own writing than for the literary hoax that fooled readers and critics alike, and for the violent act that ended his life and his wife's.