Type of bind: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 808.0072
EAN num: 9780805068122
ISBN number: 0805068120
Label: Holt Paperbacks
Manufacturer: Holt Paperbacks
Quantity: 1
Page Count: 320
Printing Date: October 01, 2001
Publishing house: Holt Paperbacks
Sale Popularity Level: 759754
Studio: Holt Paperbacks
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Product Description:
From the professor with an extraordinary gift for unmasking the authors of anonymous documents comes the inside story of how he solves his most challenging cases.
In Author Unknown, Don Foster reveals a starling fact: since no two people use language in precisely the same way, our identities are encoded in our own language, a kind of literary DNA. Combining traditional scholarship with modern technology, Foster has discovered how to unlock that code and, in the process, has invented an entire field of investigation--literary forensics--by which it becomes possible to catch anonymous authors as they ultimately betray their identities with their own words.
Foster's unique skills very first came to light when a front-page New York Times article announced his discovery that a previously unattributed poem was written by Shakespeare. A few weeks later, Foster solved the mystery that had obsessed America for months when he identified Joe Klein as the author of Primary Colors. Foster also took on the case of an oddball California bag lady who many believed to be the elusive Thomas Pynchon. His contributions to the Unabomber case takes us inside the tangled mind of Ted Kaczynski. And, in the final chapter, Foster makes a surprising-and heartening-discovery about a beloved holiday icon.
As entertaining as it is eye opening, Author Unknown shows us how Don Foster uses his unusual methods to search out the hidden identities behind anonymous documents of all kinds. Anyone who reads this remarkable book will find it impossible to read-or write-in the same way as before.
Amazon.com Review:
This fascinating book describes how an English professor became a detective, sort of. Don Foster still teaches literature at Vassar College, but he's recognized as an expert in attributional theory--the idea that everybody has literary fingerprints, or, as he puts it, 'no two individuals write exactly the same way, using the same words in the same combinations, or with the same patterns of spelling and punctuation.' Foster is now an expert at identifying anonymous authors. He fell into this line of work accidentally. As a graduate student who spent his days reading forgotten Elizabethan texts, Foster stumbled upon 'A Funeral Elegy' by one 'W.S.' Through careful research, recounted in Author Unknown, he showed that it was, in fact, a long-lost poem of Shakespeare's. His claim was controversial; a chapter on this experience is as much a lesson in academic politics as attribution theory. 'To propose an addition to the Shakespeare canon is like announcing that you've found a lost book of the Bible, due for inclusion in future editions,' he writes. 'History shows that it is usually the attributor who gets burned.' For Foster, however, it became a launching pad.
In what is his most interesting chapter, Foster explains how he deduced Joe Klein was 'Anonymous,' the author of the bestselling book Primary Colors. He also became involved in the Unabomber case and a search for the identity of the mysterious novelist Thomas Pynchon. Foster is sometimes said to use computer programs to determine an author's identity, but this is only partly true: he employs searchable databases, and then conducts all of the comparative analysis himself. 'Give anonymous offenders enough verbal rope and column inches, and they will hang themselves for you, every time,' he writes. The very first three chapters--focusing on Shakespeare, Klein, and the Unabomber--are the best part of the book; the rest of it, at times, feels like filler. Yet as a whole, Author Unknown is a compelling blend of autobiography, detective story, and literary analysis. --John J. Miller
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Rated by buyers -
I've been on the Internet before there was a Web, met my wife over a Multi-User Dungeon, and wrote my master's thesis on how anonymity on the Internet makes people act out. The notion of determining the true identity of anonymous sources really appealed to me, especially since I've been the victim of more than one anonymous attack on the Internet.
And thus we have Author Unknown. My version is titled "On the Trail of Anonymous" as opposed to "Tales of a Literary Detective" - near as I can tell, it's the same book with different packaging. Which is good, because my version's cover is of a book with glasses resting on it--not very interesting. That cover exemplifies some of the problems with Author Unknown.
Don Foster is an English professor. He works in an English professor's office, he writes like an English professor, and he stumbles around in bewilderment in the "real world," solving crimes and battling other evil skeptics. He seems to have a magical ability to determine authorship through contextual cues, an ability he never explains in detail. Armed with his trusty sidekick SHAXICON (a mysterious search program that's never mentioned once in the book), the hapless Dr. Foster wages a one-man-and-computer war against those who would cloak themselves in anonymity.
The delicious revenge such a skill can bring about is especially evident when Foster tracks down his anonymous peer reviewers. Foster slices right through it all. And what anonymous villains does our hero vanquish? The author of Primary Colors! The Unabomber! Wand Tinasky! Monica Lewinsky! Clement Clarke Moore! Shakespeare himself!
In between all this detective work is a lot of inside baseball. Foster has all the insufferable qualities of an academic, including the habit of quoting everyone and everything else even marginally relevant to the subject at hand, a lot of self-pitying "but I'm just a poor English professor!", and certain assumptions that the reader knows every detail of say, the famed Talking Points or even Primary Colors. Author Unknown has aged poorly.
You won't find much detail on how Foster actually gets to the bottom of his mysteries. SHAXICON seems to do a lot of the work and Foster pieces together the rest. Sometimes Foster leads up to the Big Reveal, and other times he simply tells the reader who the culprit is and then backs into his argument. This makes the book wildly uneven, interesting in one chapter and very boring in the next.
What's shocking is how unscientific the literary world really is. Foster's work is the analysis of text in a scientific way, a way that is now accessible to everyone on the planet in a little tool you might have heard of called Google. Back then, this was big news. Now, a man who knows how to use a specialized search engine? Not so much.
If you're looking for guidance on how to track down your anonymous detractors, this book will not help you. If you're looking for a mildly interesting tale about the evolution of scientific inquiry applied to literature and search tools, then Author Unknown will be enlightening. And if you want to know the true origins of Santa's reindeer, it's a must read.
Rated by buyers 
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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.
Rated by buyers 
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Oh, no! Foster's most famous case of literary detective work, attributing The Elegy to Shakespeare instead of John Ford, has proved to be a bone-headed mistake that Foster now acknowledges (see "Literary Sleuth Absolves Bard of a Bad Poem" - TheFrontPage
New York Observer, June 24, 2002, Ron Rosenbaum). All the patronizing things Foster says in Author Unknown about people who were so sure he was wrong make him look pretty silly now. Those old fashioned scholars of Renaissance literature were right after all - and the computer maven "Literary Detective" now appears more like Clousseau than Sherlock Holmes. The book is still a fun read, though, and fun for the reader careful not to take the Sleuth's conclusions too seriously.
Rated by buyers 
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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 very 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.
Rated by buyers -
Don Foster is the guy who figured out who wrote Primary Colors, the anonymously published novel that satirized Bill Clinton's 1992 presidential campaign and for a time had all of Washington wondering who done it. Foster fingered Joe Klein as the culprit using a method he had very first applied in his doctoral dissertation to "A Funeral Elegy," a 17th-century poem that was written by a certain "W.S." after the death by homicide of William Peter of Exeter. Foster determined that the W.S. in question was in fact William Shakespeare.
Foster's method of attributional detection involves examining the internal evidence of "questioned documents"--the vocabulary, orthography, spelling, and punctuation used by the author--and comparing his findings to the known writings of some finite number of likely suspects. Writers leave their marks on manuscripts unconsciously, Foster explains, as surely as gloveless burglars leave their fingerprints, their identities betrayed in their phrasing and word choice, in the body of authors whose styles they unwittingly emulate, in their commas and ampersands.
Foster's Shakespearian bombshell landed him on the front page of the New York Times early in 1996. His celebrity resulted in this mild-mannered English professor being called upon to apply his attributional techniques to a great many other cases, some of them headline-making, in which the authorship of an important document was in question. In his fascinating book Author Unknown Foster discusses six of the cases in which he has been involved, from his investigation of the Unabomber's literary produce after Ted Kaczynski's arrest, to a study of the Talking Points document Monica Lewinsky once handed Linda Tripp, to a debate about who really wrote "The Night Before Christmas." You think the man responsible for jollying up Saint Nick and transforming Christmas into a wretched holiday for the rapacious was Clement Clarke Moore, that birchen-rod-loving Biblical scholar who hated dance and song and noise and all things fun but wasn't above taking credit where it wasn't due? Think again.
Reviewed by Debra Hamel, author of Trying Neaira: The True Story of a Courtesan's Scandalous Life in Ancient Greece
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