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Author Unknown: On the Trail of Anonymous

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Professor Don Foster has achieved a very readable non-fiction book that is destined to be a best-seller. Author Unknown combines the right amount of literary scholarship, investigative sleuthing, and humor all into one novel. This book awakens the reader's senses to not only question the literary attribution of certain popular works but explains why authors exploited the situation. Author Unknown is destined to be controversial to some readers and to descendants of Clement Clark Moore. Author Unknown attributes authorship to the proper creator of the poem "The Night Before Christmas." Foster's book is a very difficult book to put down. I read its 304 pages in two days while nursing a cold at the Four Seasons Biltmore Hotel. I can tell you that I've come across no more interesting novel in the past twelve months. --Author Anonymous

Vassar College Professor Don Foster is an armchair sleuth who has solved some of history's literary mysteries. In AUTHOR UNKNOWN: ON THE TRAIL OF ANONYMOUS, Professor Foster explains his forensic techniques in solving the real identity of the most prolifically used nom de plume, anonymous. His premise is simple: writing is like DNA or fingerprints, unique to the individual. The book also goes into the more famous cases that Professor Foster has "solved" such as identifying the author of PRIMARY COLORS or proving that Moore is not the author of THE NIGHT BEFORE CHRISTMAS. Finally, Professor Foster provides insight into how his literary analysis methodology has helped law enforcement.

AUTHOR UNKNOWN: ON THE TRAIL OF ANONYMOUS is an intriguing non-fiction work that will hook readers or writers with its different outlook. In an interesting manner with real world examples from today's headlines, Professor Foster explains his use of modern day science to ferret out the unknown behind writer of letters, books, poems, and the written word in general. This reviewer evaluated Professor Foster's writing style and concludes that his book is well written and very entertaining.

Harriet Klausner

Give anonymous offenders enough verbal rope and column inches, and they will hang themselves for you, every time. -Don Foster, Author Unknown

In a culture where your fifteen minutes of fame are immediately followed by a book deal, we are flooded with memoirs, but remarkably few are any good. For the most part, our enjoyment of these books hinges almost exclusively on our interest in the event that propelled the author into the public spotlight, however briefly. Don Foster is a Shakespeare scholar, Vassar professor, and literary sleuth, and his book, Author Unknown, is a glorious exception to this rule.

Though his name may be unfamiliar, many--at least the political junkies among us--will remember the dramatic moment when Mr. Foster unmasked Joe Klein as the man behind the nom de plume "Anonymous" and the author of Primary Colors. Foster, at the behest of New York Magazine, had compared the text of the novel to the writings of a number of the most likely suspects and had found so many stylistic and linguistic similarities between the book and Klein's column--including heavy use of adverbs, hyper hyphenation, Capitalization of Concepts, an obsession with race and a certain uncomfortableness about sexual orientation issues--that he was able to confidently pronounce Klein the author. Despite Klein's fearsome denials and some brief second thoughts, Foster stuck to his guns and eventually Klein was forced to acknowledge authorship, when handwriting samples also tied him to the manuscript.

This book contains plenty of fascinating details about the techniques Foster uses and the nitty gritty of the investigation, but the basics of the "Anonymous" caper are fairly well known, in at least general form, and, though this episode alone would probably suffice to sell the book, it is the other cases that Foster deals with that really make the book worthwhile. He starts with the work that brought him to the attention of New York's editors, when as a graduate student he managed to use his investigatory skills to attribute a poem to William Shakespeare. This story provides a truly sublime moment when, having submitted his dissertation to Oxford University Press as a book proposal, he was turned down and received instead two anonymous critiques of his work--apparently standard practice calls for scholars to read and judge submissions anonymously--wherein both authors stated that it is not possible to use only the internal evidence in written works to attribute authorship. However, Foster then proceeded to compare the critiques to the writings of various prominent Shakespeare scholars and was able to discern precisely who had written them--perhaps predictably, neither expert saw the humor in this this, but the reader surely will. Despite these early rejections, Foster was eventually credited with having discovered a new Shakespeare poem and write-ups in The New York Times and elsewhere established him as perhaps the first, certainly the leading, practitioner of literary forensics.

Later sections of the book deal with : his subsequent involvement in the JonBenet Ramsey and Unabomber cases; a demonstration that Thomas Pynchon was not the secret author behind a series of vituperative letters to the editor of Mendocino County, California newspapers, signed by Wanda Tinasky, the Fort Bragg Bag Lady; a tantalizing rumination on who may have really written the infamous "Talking Points" of Lewinsky fame; and a final chapter which pretty much demolishes the idea that Clement Moore wrote the beloved poem, 'Twas the Night Before Christmas. The Talking Points discussion is especially interesting, mostly because it remains such a galling mystery, particularly for those of us who wanted Bill Clinton led out of the White House in an orange jumper and handcuffs. Foster is not able to pin the deed on a specific culprit, but does show conclusively that the memo was not the exclusive work of Monica and her pal, Linda Tripp, and points at clues in the language and legal sophistication of at least the first page of the memo that seem to indicate it was most likely the work of one of a handful of lawyers in the Clinton inner circle. Recall that Clinton himself is a lawyer, but Foster does not pursue him directly, focussing instead on Bob Bennett, Bruce Lindsey and Vernon Jordan. He is hindered here by not having access to much written work by these three men, but it would be fun to see what he could do with more evidence.

My only criticism, and it's a mild one, is that there's a little too much "gee has my life become hectic" and "what have I gotten myself into." This is self indulgent, almost self pitying, and is at odds with the genuine excitement he obviously brings to his work. He does such a good job getting us caught up in the thrill of the chase that his complaints about the hectic lifestyle the work entails fall on deaf ears. These quibbles aside, the book was one of the more pleasant surprises to come over the transom here in quite awhile. This one is highly recommended.

GRADE : A

Ever since the story broke pinning _Primary Colors_ on Joe Klein, I've been curious about the techniques used to assign authorship to suspect documents. I've tried to research the topic a bit on the Net, but found nothing relevant. Finally Don Foster, the English professor who nailed Klein, has written a book telling his tales.

The stories (including investigating Shakespeare, Kaczynski, Lewinski, and Klein) are all very entertaining (although the Pynchon/Tinasky chapter which (a) has a fairly complicated, twisting plot; and (b)is written in a psuedo-Pynchon style is a bit hard to make sense of at points). My one regret was that the methods that Foster used are only lightly touched on. He insists at several points that he does not have a computer program that does the analysis for him, but also acknowledges that he does use several computer resources as his tools. I would have been interested in at least a chapter that detailed the process that he uses: how much is art, and how much is science (for example, how does he go about picking the trademark words and phrases from two documents to see if they have the same author? Is it merely by running some word-frequency counting tool, or does he do it manually?)

All in all, a decent, entertaining book.

Since no two people use language in precisely the same way, our identities are encoded in our own language, a kind of literary DNA. Professor Foster combines traditional scholarship with modern technology in the search for anonymous authors - creating a new field of investigation - literary forensics.

As Don Foster writes of his cases, he recounts the story of his own life because it is all intertwined & as his prowess becomes accepted he is drawn, sometimes even challenged, into cases that have made the headlines: who really did wite Primary Colors; the Tripp-Lewinsky Talking Points & the Unabom Manifesto?

When Don Foster is asked to poke his learned nose into an old, old mystery of the American Classic, "The Night Before Christmas", he is in his element & takes us on a history lesson about how Santa Claus came to be. Off we go back in time to 1823 Poughkeepsie & the writings of Mrs. Van Deusen's great-great-great-great-great grandfather who wrote funny anapestic poetry at the drop of a hat.

What I relish about Author Unknown is the language - it had me gleefully delving into my dictionary, opening up whole new realms. I had dreaded a dry rendition of brittle research & got instead, a lilting, entertaining & instructive introduction into Literary Forensics. Do check out my eInterview with this author.

I loved this book. I found myself cheering from the very beginning on the mere prospect that a so-called "useless" major like English could lead to such productive discoveries. Mr. Foster will be the first to say that he got into the field of "attributive science" by accident and that he does NOT simply plug things into a computer. Rather, he uses verbal clues (for example -- I don't put a space before my parenthesis, but I always to for my double dashes), grammar, syntax, vocabulary analysis and even the process of word formation to examine the verbal fingerprint we all leave. My favorite chapter happened to be the analysis of Joe Klein's Anonymous. After you read Foster's dissection of Klein's prose, you will see that it is crystal clear that he was the author of anonymous. The amazing part is how long Klein denied it and the big wigs he roped in to cover for him (my opinion of Dan Rather has dropped a few notches).

The chapters on the Unabomber, Lewinsky and the Shakespeare poem were all excellent as well -- spell-binding really. As my only small criticism, I thought the last chapter on Twas the Night Before Christmas was a bit more detailed than it needed to be. That being said, Foster is a terrific writer -- this turned out to be one of my favorite books of the year. Coming from an English background myself, I found myself rooting for the underdog English prof who was constantly being doubted for his analysis. On top of being a great writer, he's very funny as well. His dry humor and summary of how he was treated by the Oxford Press and their peers was worth the price of admission. Don't miss this literary detective story!

Don Foster has an unusual talent. He is a professor of English literature, specializing in Shakespeare, and so you can bet he reads a lot. But sometimes he reads not to understand the text, but specifically to detect the writer of the text. In fact, if he reads it in such a fashion, he might not understand the text at all. "When reading a text of unknown or disputed authorship, I have developed an odd way of reading, by which my brain records ideas and words and punctuation form the printed page while the story goes zipping right past me, unattended."

Foster's fascinating _Author Unknown: On the Trail of Anonymous_ (Henry Holt and Company) lets us in on some of his other secrets of being the world's foremost literary sleuth. Foster came to fame in showing that _A Funerall Elegye_ by W.S., printed in 1612 was by William Shakespeare himself. His fame got him the assignment of tracking down who wrote the political novel _Primary Colors_, and his stories of how he managed the attribution, and the media tempest that occurred to the professor afterwards, are witty and fun. He goes on to tell in detail about his work on Ted Kaczynski's writing as the Unabomber, the "talking points" paper attributed to Monica Lewinsky, and letters attributed to Thomas Pynchon. He is a good storyteller, even in cases that didn't get national attention.

His funniest stories are left for last in his search for the real author of the poem we know as "The Night Before Christmas," which Foster convinces us was not the product of Clement Moore. Hilariously, Foster presents real work of Moore, whose poems were moralistic, forgettable verses that curmudgeonly carped about scolding wives, frivolous maids, lewd coquettes, and (over and over) loud children, who obviously needed the birchen rod. Even Moore's juvenilia is crabby. The real author, Foster resoundingly demonstrates, was not the choleric Moore but the cheerful Henry Livingston, a jolly Dutch landowner whose bouncy verses were full of fun.

This is an eye-opening book that shows just what can happen when someone reads carefully. Foster does not get bogged down in details of how he does his work, but he gives us enough to explain it well, and his clear, humorous stories are a pleasure to read.

I ordered two copies of this book, hoping to learn more about literary forensics, a science virtually invented by author Don Foster, but found the material tainted by the Foster's own eagerness to even petty scores and take cheap shots.
Granted, the subject is fascinating and Foster's first few chapters regarding his investigation of a newly-discovered work by William Shakespeare and his own investigation of the writings of bomber Ted Kaczynski held my interest. One can even understand Foster's need to defend himself against the professonal assaults that greeted his early work, but as the book continued, Foster became less concerned with facts and increasingly interested in self-aggrandizement and cheap political shots. What started out as a fascinating academic work turned into an overly-long gossip column.

After reading the introduction, I was hooked. I knew I'd have to read the whole thing, no matter how tedious and technical it might be. Lucky for me, it was neither. With the exception of a sometimes dull first chapter, it was a lively and entertaining book.

Foster's "literary detection" began with his doctoral thesis. He found a poem he thought likely to have been written by Shakespeare. He comparing writing styles, specific words, references and other "internal evidence" to known Shakespearian works. With this, Foster was able to determine that yes, "A Funeral Elegy" was written by the Bard himself.

Due to the press he received by this announcement, he was contacted for his opinion on the anonymous author Primary Colors. Using the same methodology, he successfully pinpointed the author as Joe Klein--who denied it vehemently for some time before admitting his authorship.

In addition to these highly publicized cases, Foster writes about his un-used work on both Unabomber case and the Talking Points, his angering of some Thomas Poyner fans and the truth behind "Twas the Night Before Christmas."

This was an entertaining and enlightening book that I highly recommend. It's certainly the only non-fiction book I've ever stayed up late to read! I give it a 9.5 out of 10.

Author Unknown intrigued me for its interesting concept of the identification of writers based on their prior works. While the overall concept was neat, the execution was less than stellar.

Initially, my favorite chapter was the Shakespeare chapter....I found it fascinating how Mr. Foster painstakingly pieced together scraps of information to formulate his theory. But, he lost some of my respect when every other sentence was to poke fun (in a rather childish way) at the other scholars who had come before him and had been less than successful at their tasks. Not classy. Unfortunately, my interest in the chapter was blown once I discovered that 2 years after the publication of this book, it was written up in the NY Times regarding his erroneous claim for the 'Funeral Elegy'....it was John Ford, NOT Shakespeare who authored it. Hmmmmm....open mouth, remove foot, Mr. Foster.

Moving on, the other good chapters were the ones on the Unabomber and 'Primary Colors'. These chapters actually gave insight into Mr. Foster's method of attacking the unknown with regards to the written word. It was fascinating to get a glimpse into how to approach this new methodology.

Sadly, the rest of the chapters were not as engaging. The 'Talking Points' chapter was SO long-winded and full of useless details, I got so confused and felt like I was reading in circles. The 'Night Before Christmas' chapter was painful to read, with the author basically satirizing everyone who approaches him for his help. His attitude is one of "woe is me, I've gotten SO famous" - now, every Tom, Dick and Harry is coming out of the woodwork to consult me about their long-dead relatives' writings.

Overall, an interesting concept and kept me engrossed somewhat...I would recommend certain chapters out of the book, but not all. Too bad Mr. Foster didn't realize that the basic, no-frills description of his work is the main course....we don't need the side dishes of self-aggrandizement, sarcasm and snickering behind his competitors' backs in order to come away feeling satisfied.