Saturday, April 1, 2017
Myrna Minkoff identified??
Recently I ran across a folk song written by a poet named Frances Myra Minkoff. She is best known for co-writing songs with Fred Hellerman of the Weavers, which was a folk group based in Greenwich Village in the 1950s. One of her anti-war songs was recorded by Harry Belafonte in 1963. So she was an active in New York about the time that John Kennedy Toole was studying at Columbia. In Confederacy of Dunces, Myrna Minkoff is a clueless, dogmatic leftist who carries a guitar and inflicts folk songs on listeners. I know nothing about Fran Minkoff's personality, so I cannot speculate on whether Ken Toole borrowed anything from her but her name and her penchance for counterculture folk lyrics, but I am willing to bet that the name of his character is adapted from her name.
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That is an interesting connection. I thought that Myrna Minkoff may have been a reference to Marilyn Monroe: the same initials, Marilyn Monroe being associated with mink as in "Minkoff", and both apparently having a Jewish background. Plus, JKT wrote a tribute to Marilyn Monroe in a letter to JKT's parents, that letter being in the Tulane University digital archive of JKT's papers. However, there are two other connections that may be somewhat tenuous. Firstly, Isaiah Minkoff was a civil rights activist who organized the March on Washington with Martin Luther King Jr in 1963. This may tie-in with Myrna Minkoff's activism in "Dunces". Secondly, a newspaper clipping among JKT's papers at Tulane University refers to Myra Monahan from Dominican High as a performer in a stage show in 1952. Maybe the only similarity is the name and the initials in that case.
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