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
A Visit from St. Nicholas did not authorize the earliest publication of the poem in the Troy "Sentinel", he had close ties to Troy through the Protestant Episcopal Church that could explain how it got there. Harriet Butler of Troy, New York (daughter of the Rev. David Butler) who allegedly showed the poem to "Sentinel" editor Orville L. Holley, was a family friend of Moore's and possibly a distant relative. A letter to Moore from the publisher Norman Tuttle states, "I understand from Mr. Holley that he received it from Mrs. Sackett, the wife of Mr. Daniel Sackett who was then a merchant in this