Harper Lee and Other People: A Stylometric Diagnosis

A number of biographical or semi-biographical publications on To Kill a Mockingbird prove that the story surrounding Harper Lee's writing of the novel has a life of its own, interwoven with the cultural functioning of the book. Her troubled friendship with Truman Capote; her relationship with her father, Amasa Coleman Lee, upon whom the character of Atticus Finch is largely modeled; her reclusiveness after the astounding success of her debut--all these elements have attracted the interest of the general public almost as much as the fictional story she authored. Here, Choinski et al complement literary history with stylometry and biography with statistics and discuss the various quantitative results that make too much sense in time-proven hermeneutic interpretations to be discarded as coincidences.