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Donald Wayne 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 <[William Shakespeare|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 small amounts of acceptance, most notably with some 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". <http://web.archive.org/web/20010802184633/www.linguafranca.com/9807/crain.html> In <[2002>], Gilles Monsarrat and Brian Vickers came to the conclusion that <[John Ford (dramatist)|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," Professor Foster said. "No one who cannot rejoice in the discovery of his own mistakes deserves to be called a scholar."

In the mid-<[1990s|nineties>], the academic controversy began to attract popular attention, leading to Foster seek to apply 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. Donald Foster describes it this way: "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>]- but Foster was not the first to ID Klein as the writer of Primary colors - former Clinton Speech Writer David Kusnet was. He wrote about it in the Baltimore Sun. It was after that that Donald Foster revealed HIS opinion in New York Magazine.
  • confirming David Kaczynski's testimony that the <[Unabomber>] manifesto was written by his brother, Ted. Foster was called in AFTER TK's arrest - after his brother said the manifesto that had been made public matched his brother's writings. Foster compared papers and agreed with the brother.
  • identifying an obscure <[Beat Generation|Beat>] writer, Tom Hawkins, as the author of the <[Wanda Tinasky>] letters, commonly assumed to be the work of <[Thomas Pynchon>] (still being argued)
  • 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>](still being argued)

Foster has garnered controversy for his techniques. In particular, his involvement in the <[JonBenét Ramsey>] murder case aroused criticism when it emerged that the scholar had offered his services to both sides, initially lobbying for Patsy Ramsey's innocence, but then going on a few months later, having been spurned by Ramsey's lawyers and hired by the police, to argue for the opposite verdict. When he offered his services to the Ramseys, he felt he had identified the killer - he believed an Internet poster using the screen name jameson was really JonBenét's half brother and her killer. (That despite the public announcement that the brother had been cleared because he had not been in the same state.) In fact, jameson was not a 20 year old southern college kid but a middle aged housewife from Massachusetts. When he offered his services to the Boulder police, however, he was prepared to testify that no one but Patsy Ramsey wrote the ransom note. jameson's mail to the Boulder authorities and her appearance on CBS 48 Hours helped prevent Foster from being used as an expert witness in that case.

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 magazine|Vanity Fair>] naming <[Steven Hatfill>] as a prime suspect (Hatfill had already been labeled a "<[person of interest>]" by <[United States Attorney General|Attorney General>] <[John Ashcroft>]). Hatfill is suing Foster for <[defamation>]. <http://msnbc.msn.com/id/6152515>

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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