(b Lawrenceville, now part of Pittsburgh, PA, July 4, 1826; d New York, NY, Jan 13, 1864). American songwriter of Scots-Irish descent. He was born the ninth child of William Barclay Foster, a businessman and sometime politician, and Eliza Clayland Tomlinson. Though neither parent was musical, their daughters’ education in voice and piano, Mrs. Foster’s subscriptions to literary magazines, and social gatherings brought music and poetry into the home. The details of his life and career are sketchy. His first biography, an introduction to a collected edition of his songs prepared by his brother Morrison (1896), offered impressions that were long repeated unquestioningly. As the keeper of the family papers, Morrison discarded or altered embarrassing correspondence and portrayed the songwriter as a naive genius, devoted to his parents, a dreamer and hopelessly inept at business. In the 1930s–40s, John Tasker Howard and Morrison’s daughter Evelyn Foster Morneweck maintained his view while providing documentary accounts of Stephen and the family based on the remaining papers, as well as the archive assembled by Josiah Kirby Lilly in Indianapolis and donated to the University of Pittsburgh (...