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
Jolly Old Saint Nicholas Jolly Old Saint Nicholas "Jolly Old Saint Nicholas" is a Christmas song that originated with a poem by Emily Huntington Miller (1833-1913), published as "Lilly's Secret" in "The Little Corporal Magazine" in December 1865. The song's lyrics have also been attributed to Benjamin Hanby, who wrote a similar song in the 1860s, Up on the Housetop. However, the lyrics now in common use closely resemble Miller's 1865 poem. The music has been attributed to John Piersol McCaskey, a school principal and former Mayor of Lancaster, Pennsylvania, who claimed to have written the song in 1867. The "Johnny" mentioned in the