Literature as a Projection of the Author's Personality

Summary

N Achievement, n Affiliation, and Mean Sentence Length were studied in the TAT protocols and the short stories of 10 published authors. Only low correlations and small differences among authors were found. Mean Sentence Length did not discriminate among authors. It did show differences between TAT and short stories, suggesting that the planned control which goes into story writing is an important aspect of how an author writes. Results are discussed in terms of the Zeitgeist, the collective personality of society, as well as the individual personality of the author.