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.
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.
In 1990, Bruce Anderson, the editor of the AVA, read Thomas Pynchon's Vineland, a novel set-in northern California.
Foster's previous work was based on direct comparisons between unidentified and identified texts, looking for patterns in vocabulary, usage, and orthography.
He married Kathleen Marie Gallaner and worked for Boeing in the early fifties, then in Beaumont, Texas, in television, for station KFDM, and advertising.
After Hawkins retired, he and Kathleen moved to Mendocino County just outside Fort Bragg, where they lived in poverty for most of the eighties.
[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.
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.