About M. L. Winitsky

asking history “what if..?”

My Story

Despite having been tethered to facts as a teaching assistant, historian, professor, and consultant for most of his life, M. L. Winitsky has long been fascinated by the what-ifs of history.

Even as an undergraduate majoring in European History at UCLA, during exams Winitsky (bending to expectation and demand) often tested his professors’ intellectual flexibility by presenting alternative scenarios to supplement a comprehensive factual answer. Once M. L. ascended to professorship himself, he managed to engage his students in extracurricular “what if” excursions despite the constrains of canonically hide-bound academia.

As Director of Research for Alan Landsburg Productions, which developed and produced many television shows in the 1970s, Winitsky continued advocating for his passion, pitching several ahead-of-their-time alternative scenarios to major historical personages and events that were deemed too radical for television audiences.

Times have changed, as evidenced by the proliferation of historical fiction and alternate history as legitimate genres in both the popular (the Amazon Prime adaptation of Phillip K. Dick’s The Man in the High Castle) and literary (Philip Roth’s The Plot Against America) spheres.

The moment arrived for Winitsky to finally make his lifetime interest a reality. The result is the alternate history / occult fiction / magical realism epic A Fly on the Wall.