MOST public figures, including writers, welcome publicity nowadays. If anything, the press has to be on guard against overeager publicity seekers. But there are some personalities who make a fetish of resisting exposure--and they are more of a problem. As it happens, TIME this week deals with two of them, both authors.

One is the mysterious Thomas Pynchon, whose novel Gravity's Rainbow is reviewed in our Books section by R.Z. Sheppard. The other elusive character is our cover subject, Anthropologist Carlos Castaneda, whose three volumes about his experience with Indian Sorcerer Don Juan have become national bestsellers.

Castaneda's penchant for privacy did not deter Correspondent Sandra Burton from unraveling some of the mysteries about the author. Burton met her subject repeatedly--at U.C.L.A.'s anthropology department, over dinner at a Japanese restaurant and at a "power spot" in the rugged canyons north of Los Angeles.

"Certain details of his personal history were not checking out as factually correct," says Burton, "and I confronted him with the discrepancies. He countered with an appealing argument that vital statistics are not pertinent, that what is important is who we are now, not who we were. He had succeeded in cutting himself off from his past and had admittedly fudged on his vital statistics. My job was to recover them."

While TIME correspondents in Italy dug for proof of Castaneda's residence some 20 years ago in Milan, reporters in Buenos Aires and Rio de Janeiro sought to trace his early years in South America. Correspondent Bernard Diederich visited known witchcraft centers in rural Mexico in search of Don Juan, and Sandra Burton herself traveled south of the border seeking the shaman. In New York, Reporter-Researcher Patricia Beckert interviewed Castaneda's friends and fellow anthropologists.

Digging through old records, Burton finally found immigration papers indicating that Castaneda's origins were really Peruvian. With that clue, our reporter in Peru, Tomas A. Loayza, discovered the first solid biographical facts about Castaneda by locating members of his family, their jewelry shop and former friends in Lima.

The story was written by Robert Hughes, who himself had interviewed Castaneda two years ago, and edited by Timothy Foote. "The real man probably exists somewhere between the factual past that we resurrected and his own accounts of it," concludes Correspondent Burton. "In a way, Castaneda sought to describe the essence of a separate reality and we, using traditional standards of reality, sought the essence of Castaneda. Both remain elusive."

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