Henry Livingston, Jr.

Who was Henry Livingston, Jr.?

Henry Livingston, Jr. has been proposed as being the uncredited author of the poem "A Visit from St. Nicholas", more popularly known as "The Night Before Christmas." Credit for the poem was taken in 1837 by Clement Clarke Moore, a bible scholar in New York City, nine years after Livingston's death. It wasn't until another twenty years that the Livingston family knew of Moore's claim, and it wasn't until 1900 that they went public with their claim. Since then, the question has been repeatedly raised and argued by experts on both sides.

In 2000, Professor Don Foster made a strong case for Livingston's authorship, while Professor Stephen Nissenbaum and manuscript dealer Seth Keller, who had owned a Moore manuscript copy of the poem at the time of Foster's book, argued for Moore. Fifteen years later New Zealand scholar and Emeritus Professor of English Literature, MacDonald P. Jackson, invested over a year of research statistically analyzing the poetry of both men. His conclusion: "Every test, so far applied, associates "The Night Before Christmas" much more closely with Livingston's verse than with Moore's."