Quantifying the vicissitude of Fitzgerald´s creativity a statistical analysis based on lexical measures

Traditionally, the critical evaluation of a writer´s creativity depends heavily on the critic´s taste. However, this qualitative criticism is subjective, for it does not take the text´ s intrinsic characteristics in to account. The power law distribution in different lexical texts has been discovered widely by the study on computational linguistics, which provides a statistical method for quantifying the intrinsic characteristics of literary texts. In this condition, Scott Fitzgerald´s four novels are taken a s examples to analyze statistically their lexical measures, such as the type token ratio, vocabulary growth rate and relative entropy. And a new measure is put forward to calculate the writer´s creativity, with which a new means to make a minute comparison of his creativity´s variation is also proposed. The experimental analysis of Fitzgerald´s novels demonstrates that this measure can not only corroborate the existing critical o pinions, but also portray the vicissitude of a writer´s creative ability effectively. And the omnipresence of power law makes us deem that the method proposed in this paper can be applied to studying other famous writer´s creativity and his works´ literary reputation.