Donald Foster, a professor of English at Vassar College in New York, is famed for being the first scholar in over a century to discover a "new" poem by Shakespeare, A Funerall Elegye in memory of the late Vertuous Maister William Peeter (he later recanted and re-ascribed the poem to John Ford). Foster uses a mixture of traditional scholarship and computers to perform his "textual analysis". At his best, he is perhaps the closest literary scholarship gets to proving something "by algebra".
High points include:
- the identification of Joe Klein as the author of Primary Colors (Klein denied it for six months, then finally came clean)
- confirming David Kaczynski's testimony that the Unabomber manifesto was written by his brother, Ted
- identifying an obscure Beat writer, Tom Hawkins, as the author of the Wanda Tinasky letters previously (almost universally) assumed to be the work of Thomas Pynchon
Foster is the author of several books including: Author Unknown: On the Trail of Anonymous and Elegy by W.S.: A Study in Attribution.
See also