Clement Clarke Moore

Born on July 15, 1779, at Chelsea, his mother's family estate in what was then open country north of New York City, Clement Clarke Moore was the son of Benjamin Moore, later Episcopal bishop of New York and president of Columbia College, and Charity Clarke Moore. He graduated from Columbia as valedictorian in 1798 and took his master's degree there in 1801. A scholar of languages by temperament, he published a two-volume Hebrew lexicon in 1809. In 1813 he married Catharine Elizabeth Taylor, with whom he had nine children, and the same year his parents deeded him the Chelsea estate. He gave part of its apple orchard to the General Theological Seminary, where construction began in 1827 and where he taught until 1850, and in the 1820s he laid out the surrounding streets for sale with James N. Wells. The poem that made his name famous was almost an afterthought. "A Visit from St. Nicholas" appeared anonymously in the Troy Sentinel on December 23, 1823, sent in by a friend, and was reprinted for years without a byline. Moore was first named as its author in print in 1837, in Charles Fenno Hoffman's anthology The New-York Book of Poetry, and he collected it under his own name in his Poems of 1844. The attribution has not gone unchallenged. Relatives of Henry Livingston Jr., a Hudson Valley poet who died in 1828, recalled that he read the verses to his children from about 1807, though no printing under his name has turned up and he is not known to have claimed it himself. Donald Foster's stylistic study of 2000 and MacDonald P. Jackson's in 2016 favored Livingston, while Stephen Nissenbaum, Tom Jerman and Shlomo Argamon have argued for Moore, and the question remains open to dispute. Moore died on July 10, 1863, at his summer home in Newport, Rhode Island, aged eighty-three.

On December 23, 1823, the Troy Sentinel printed a poem about the night before Christmas with no author's name on it. A friend of Moore's had sent it in, apparently believing it his. It was reprinted for years without a byline, and his name was attached to it in print only in 1837, in a New York anthology of verse.