Who Wrote the Serenity Prayer?

Fred Shapiro's Yale Alumni Magazine investigation into the Serenity Prayer's authorship is a rare case where the author himself changed his conclusion as new evidence appeared, and that history is worth carrying alongside the piece. Shapiro, editor of the Yale Book of Quotations, first cast doubt on Reinhold Niebuhr's authorship after finding earlier circulating versions of similar wording. He later revised that skepticism, reporting that a 1932 diary entry from YWCA official Winnifred Wygal, recording Niebuhr using the prayer a decade before his own claimed 1942 date, significantly improved the case for Niebuhr as originator without fully proving it. Shapiro's own final language, that the evidence improves the likelihood rather than proves the fact, is the honest limit of a careful bibliographic investigation into an attribution that still cannot be settled with certainty.