Reviews of Author Unknown by Don Wayne Foster

Book Summary

From the professor with an extraordinary gift for uncovering the authors of anonymous documents comes the inside story of how he solves his most challenging cases.

In Author Unknown, Don Foster reveals a startling 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 betray their identities with their own words.

Foster's unexpected career as a literary sleuth began when he solved a puzzle in Shakespeare's Sonnets that had stumped scholars for centuries, and then stumbled onto another literary mystery, a funeral poem written for a 1612 murder victim. After definitively connecting the "W.S." who wrote the poem with William Shakespeare, Foster found himself on the front page of The New York Times. Just days later, he was invited to try to crack the case that at the time was a national obsession: who was the anonymous author of Primary Colors? In less than a week, Foster unmasked Joe Klein.

Foster's methodology was immediately understood by prosecutors and other investigators to be a perfect tool for identifying the authors of critical documents in criminal cases. Soon, he was enlisted in the infamous Unabomber case, and in a fascinating chapter he takes us inside the tangled mind of Ted Kaczynski, the former professor who gave new meaning to the academic motto "Publish or perish." Then it's back to Washington, for the capital's hottest new guessing game: who wrote the Lewinsky-Tripp "Talking Points"?

Returning to the literary, Foster investigates the case of "Wanda Tinasky," the oddball California bag lady who many believed to be Thomas Pynchon. 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.