Donald Foster

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This page is about the American professor, who uses "Donald W. Foster" in his academic writing and "Don Foster" in his popular writing. See Don Foster for the UK politician.

Donald W. Foster, born 1950, is a professor of English at Vassar College in New York. He achieved instant academic notoriety with his 1985 doctoral thesis, which tentatively identified Shakespeare as the author "W. S." of an obscure 1612 poem, A Funerall Elegye in memory of the late Vertuous Maister William Peeter, the first new Shakespeare identification in over a century. The scholarly community widely rejected the claim, but as the controversy subsided, the idea gained some traction, most notably with a few publishers who included the poem in their Complete Shakespeare editions. In 1995, Foster went further by announcing that "A Funerall Elegye belongs hereafter with Shakespeare's poems and plays". [link] In 2002, Gilles Monsarrat and Brian Vickers came to the conclusion that John Ford was more likely to be the correct author, and Foster admitted he had been wrong: "I know good evidence when I see it and I predict that Monsarrat will carry the day [...] No one who cannot rejoice in the discovery of his own mistakes deserves to be called a scholar."[link]

In the mid-nineties, the academic controversy began to attract popular attention, which lead to Foster applying his "literary detective" skills to various anonymous and pseudonymous texts. Using a mixture of traditional scholarship and computers to perform textual comparisons, Foster looks for unique and unusual usage patterns. In his own words:

Anybody with dexterity and brains can fake handwriting, but (given a sufficiently large text sample) no one can utterly disguise his own linguistic habits (spelling, diction, grammatical accidence, syntax, internal biographical evidence, psycholinguistic material, etc.)

It should be noted that computer based statistical techniques for textual analysis had been used by historians long before Foster developed his own, most notably with the Federalist Papers, with very little controversy.

High points in Foster's work include:

"outing" Joe Klein as the author of Primary Colors - though he was not the first to identify Klein as the writer of this "anonymous" bestseller - former Clinton Speech Writer David Kusnet came to the same conclusion, publishing his research in the Baltimore Sun before Foster named Klein in New York Magazine.

confirming David Kaczynski's testimony that the Unabomber manifesto was written by his brother, Ted. Foster was called in after Ted Kaczynski's arrest, and after David Kaczynski announced that the manifesto matched his brother's writings.

identifying an obscure Beat writer, Tom Hawkins, as the author of the Wanda Tinasky letters, commonly assumed to be the work of Thomas Pynchon.

confirming a Livingston family tradition that it was their ancestor, Henry Livingston Jr., and not Clement Clarke Moore, who wrote A Visit from St. Nicholas.

Foster has taken an interest in the 2001 anthrax attacks. Initially he argued that the perpetrator was likely a foreigner, but later wrote an article for Vanity Fair naming Steven Hatfill as a prime suspect (Hatfill had already been labeled a "person of interest" by Attorney General John Ashcroft). Hatfill is suing Foster for defamation. [link]

Foster is the author of two books: Elegy by W.S.: A Study in Attribution (1989) ISBN 0874133351 and Author Unknown: On the Trail of Anonymous (2000) ISBN 0805063579.

References

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