The Gospel According to Pinkwater

by Nina Shengold and photographs by Jennifer May, July 25, 2007

 

Daniel Pinkwater has written a hundred books, give or take. The man who coined the monikers Clarence Yojimbo, Lance Hergeschleimer, and Flipping Hades Terwilliger seems undecided about his own name, sometimes billing himself as D. Manus Pinkwater. Here is a tasting of bios from some of his book jackets:

“D. Manus Pinkwater was born in Tennessee. He went to school, traveled all over the world, and wound up in Hoboken, New Jersey.”—Lizard Music, 1976

“Daniel Pinkwater was completely unknown until the early 1940s. Then he was born. Even then he continued to be known to a very few. In recent years, however, he has become so well-known that to add further facts would be to gild the lily. Suffice it to say that he is never mistaken for anyone else.”—The Snarkout Boys & the Baconburg Horror, 1984

“Daniel Pinkwater is crazy about writing, and has been trying to learn how to do it for 50 years. He thinks The Neddiad is his best book so far—but he always says that.”—The Neddiad, 2007

All of the above may be true. Or not. Facts tend to soften and morph in the wildly imaginative atmosphere of Pinkwater’s universe.

Daniel and Jill Pinkwater live in a 19th-century farmhouse in Hyde Park, hidden from the road by rambling hedges. Jill—redheaded, salty, and vigorous—opens the door of a black-and-white-tiled kitchen. A calico cat blinks on a rug in one corner, next to a wall lined with cookbooks and onions. There’s a wooden Dutch door at the foot of the stairs, against which two dogs hurl themselves, barking and yodeling.