Word: authorships
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...Wolfe and used the pieces to put together his novel's author-hero. This is not the same thing as drawing a fictional portrait of Wolfe. Wouk is not interested in Wolfe's life, except as a scenario for a searching inquiry into the agonizing problems of authorship (taxes, how to get the highest bid for movie rights, etc.). Wolfe's autobiographical novels proved him to be socko literary material; why invent a mediocre character when you can crib a good...
...major "index of authorship" used in Mosteller's study is a word count. "For instance," he explained, "Hamilton uses the word 'enough' often, Madison only rarely." Mosteller thus might be able to determine that an article with enough "enough's" was probably written by Hamilton, always checking by the use of the recurrent words...
Another "index of authorship," average sentence length, was employed in a statistical study done elsewhere to determine whether or not a single person wrote the lliad. Mosteller tried this but found that it would not work with the Federalist problem, because Madison and Hamilton wrote sentences similar in length, moreover, they both shared "a complicated style and phrasing...
Mosteller said that his study was probably more interesting as a statistical than as a historical problem since the authorship of the 11 papers is not of particular concern to most historians...
Offensive Burden. The Kennedy program was the product of several minds (though it is not certain that there will ever be any fight to claim the authorship). John Kennedy, as a big-city Congressman and Senator, had never been noted for lively interest in agriculture; in 1956 he voted against high farm subsidies, switched his position only after Farm Belt resentment threatened his national political ambitions. In 1962, while trying to balance the nation's budget, he can only view the huge farm burden as offensive. Agriculture Secretary Orville Freeman, a former Governor of Minnesota, had little exposure...