Author Unknown by Don Foster
Posted on February 19th, 2006
I only made it about 50 pages into this book, less than a quarter of the way in. The pitch from the jacket copy is compelling: "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." I came into this book thinking I'd get a look at how this type of linguistic analysis can be performed-- the nuts and bolts of it. Instead I got a disproportionate amount of autobiography mixed in with detective-genre sleuthing. It didn't seem worthwhile to wait around to get to the good stuff.
The book starts off with Foster's efforts on attributing the poem "A Funeral Elegy" to Shakespeare, then moves on to other "cases" that range from the book Primary Colors to the Unabomber case to Thomas Pynchon. Each unraveling of anonymity could make for an interesting collision between science, literature, and language. But they also make for stories in their own right.
I found a lot of storytelling in the pages I made it through: little to no how or why, abundant when and where and who. You'll read about Foster's days as a graduate student, and about how he got involved in the Elegy poem while doing his dissertation. You'll read about how much time he spent in the library staring at microfilm, how he took this clue here and that clue there and slowly worked toward a conclusion. If you're interested in these story aspects, I'm sure you'll be riveted. If you have an eye to the methods and technique, though, your reaction may be more of a "Who cares?"
The reviews on Amazon for Author Unknown bring some additional insight to the table. Since the book was written in 2000, Foster has apparently acknowledged that his conclusions about the Elegy poem were wrong. As the reviewers suggest, if you're going to read this book you need to treat parts of it at least with a grain of salt.