Donald Wayne Foster raised arguments challenging whether the person traditionally identified as the author of a text was correct. He has pointed to an obscure Beat writer, Tom Hawkins, as the author of the Wanda Tinasky letters, which some had previously speculated to be the work of Thomas Pynchon. Foster also joined a long-running effort by descendants of Henry Livingston Jr. to show that their ancestor, and not Clement Clarke Moore, wrote the famous poem "A Visit from St. Nicholas". Foster provided his account of sleuthing out these and other identifications in his book "Author Unknown" (including the Shakespeare-"Elegy" connection, which he still
Saint Nicholas Nicholas's death. The earliest complete account of Nicholas's life that has survived to the present is a "Life of Saint Nicholas", written in the early ninth century by Michael the Archimandrite (814–842), nearly 500 years after Nicholas's probable death. Despite its extremely late date, Michael the Archimandrite's "Life of Saint Nicholas" is believed to heavily rely on older written sources and oral traditions. The identity and reliability of these sources, however, remains uncertain. Catholic historian D. L. Cann and medievalist Charles W. Jones both consider Michael the Archimandrite's "Life" the only account of Saint Nicholas that is likely to contain