Author Unknown: On the Trail of Anonymous

HThe Elizabethan scholar from Vassar College who unmasked Joe Klein as the ""Anonymous"" who wrote Primary Colors now shakes up Yuletide verse with a reattribution of ""A Visit from St. Nicholas."" The selected cases of literary detection that lead up to this final surprise are the scholarly equivalent of FBI psychological profiler John Douglas's Mindhunter. Foster's textual forensics have put ""A Funeral Elegy"" by ""W.S."" into the Shakespeare canon and helped put Unabomber Ted Kaczynski in prison. His accounts of his high-profile roles in transatlantic Shakespearean squabbles and journalistic whodunits are both personable and page-turning. Whether it's because the statistical side of Foster's methodology is rather technical or that his critics have dismissed him as a ""professor with a computer program,"" he mostly sticks to describing the fingerprints of word choice and telltale punctuation rather than lexical databases and verbal probabilities. In his case for a Scots-Dutch Revolutionary War major, Henry Livingston Jr., as the author of ""A Visit from St. Nicholas"" and against puritan Manhattan professor Clement Moore, to whom it is traditionally attributed, he argues from not only lively biographic inference but also such small, telling details as the adverbial use of ""all"" and the Scottish origins of ""snug."" While lexiphiles will enjoy such minutiae, any book lover can savor the irony of how an Elizabethan elegy eventually put a literary scholar on the trail of a serial murderer. (Nov. 7)