“On one hand, we have a man of inherited wealth, his way greased by the power and position of his family, but also a man who believed in the public good (even if he didn’t like city hall telling him what to do with his property) and believed in helping struggling artists—and a man, yes, with enough twinkle in his soul to write the world’s most famous poem about Santa Claus—in the spirit of Christmas, let’s be generous and assume he was the author. And then you have a man on the run from his creditors and the law, a toothless, middle-aged immigrant who arrived in this country with little more than a beat-up violin and a few words of broken English.”