Clement Clarke Moore

Clement Clarke Moore (1779–1863) was an American scholar and poet, the son of the Episcopal bishop of New York. Educated at Columbia, he compiled a Hebrew and English lexicon, the first of its kind published in America, taught Oriental and Greek literature at the General Theological Seminary and donated the land in Manhattan on which it stands, part of his family estate of Chelsea. He is remembered for a single poem, A Visit from St. Nicholas, written for his children and published anonymously in a Troy newspaper in 1823, which he acknowledged only in 1844. Its reindeer, chimney and jolly saint fixed the modern American image of Santa Claus.