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 "breast" in "The moon on the breast of the new-fallen snow" is frequently bowdlerized to "crest"; the archaic "ere" in "But I heard him exclaim ere he drove out of sight" is frequently replaced with "as". This change implies that Santa Claus made his exclamation during the moment that he disappeared from view, while the exclamation came before his disappearance in the original. "Happy Christmas to all, and to all a good-night" is frequently rendered with the traditional English locution "Merry Christmas". The poem has been set to music by composer Ken Darby (1909 – 1992), and by British child