Why Wasn't It "Grapes of Glee"? Study of Books Finds Economic Link Could the emotional connotations of words in literature be a kind of lagging economic indicator? According to scientists who analyzed a century's worth of writing, they might: After using big-data techniques to document the frequency of sad and happy words in millions of books, the researchers concluded that the emotional mood of literature reflects the mood of the economy over the previous 10 years. The researchers, based in Britain, sifted three million digitized English-language books through a statistical sieve and created a "literary misery index" - calculated by an equation that subtracts the frequency of words associated with joy from words associated with sadness. They then matched that against a well-known indicator called the "economic misery index" - the sum of inflation rates and unemployment rates - and found that literary misery in a given year correlated with the average of the previous decade's economic misery index numbers. The 10-year time frame was a better match than the average over the previous 30 years or the previous four years, said the study's lead author, R. Alexander Bentley, an anthropologist at University of Bristol. So, for example, Steinbeck's "Grapes of Wrath," published in 1939, would be expected to have a "literary misery index" that tracked with the economic mood of the years 1929 to 1939, the Depression era. "One of the biggest peaks in literary misery is after the Great Depression," Dr. Bentley said. While his team did not analyze specific books, Dr. Bentley said, to use the example of Steinbeck: "It's not about the time when he's writing. It's about the times that he's drawing upon that goes into his writing. The study, which used 20th-century fiction and nonfiction books, was published Wednesday by the Public Library of Science's journal PLOS One. Dr. Bentley acknowledged that some people learning of these results "would say, "no duh," " but, he said, "To me it confirms that we do have a collective memory that conditions the way we write, and that economics is a very important driver of that." Authors and other literary figures reacted with some amusement to the findings, noting that books take years to write, so they naturally reflect earlier times. "I admit, I am laughing," Jane Smiley, who won a Pulitzer Prize in 1992 for "A Thousand Acres," wrote in an email. In a telephone interview, she said: "We think we're all unique, and we think every novel is individual, and it is. So when they reduce us all to a bunch of data about words, I guess you have to laugh. Chang-rae Lee, another novelist, said, "My impression is, of course there's a lag" between economic conditions and their reflection in literature. For fiction writers, you have to be able to ingest and digest this stuff. Kimberly Neuendorf, a communications professor at Cleveland State University who studies content analysis, said that using powerful search tools to analyze a serious subject like literature was "a welcome alternative to the pop application of big data to analyze Twitter trends and Google search popularity." She added: "Anyone with a computer can pull this big data together and find out what the current mood is of Kanye West, but this is much bigger. It makes me think how important our economy seems to be to our culture. She cited a few earlier studies melding science and art. A 1990 study, for example, found that depressing lyrics in Top 40 songs predicted economic pessimism about two years later. A 1999 study found that when social and economic conditions were bad, movie actresses with "mature facial features" - small eyes, thin cheeks, large chins - were popular, but when conditions were good, the public liked actresses with childlike features. In the new study, researchers also analyzed 650,000 German books and found the same misery correlation. Still, the practice of applying data-sorting algorithms to art can only go so far. For one thing, the lists of emotion words, created by other researchers and used for years, include some surprising choices: words like "smug" and "wallow" were among 224 words on the "joy" list; potentially neutral adjectives like "dark" and "low" were among 115 words on the "sadness" list. What about authors who produced work over several decades? Is the mood of each book really influenced by the economy of the previous 10 years, or have they developed a style based on other factors? Lorin Stein, editor of The Paris Review, said that Philip Roth's "Goodbye, Columbus," published in 1959, may have had echoes of the prosperous economy during the previous decade, but the economy could not explain later works like "American Pastoral," published in 1997. "The tricky thing is that people get older and no one stays cheerful forever," Mr. Stein said. Look at Roth. His later works included unrelenting misery. Yes, America happened to be a much richer country in "Goodbye, Columbus," but he was also young." Many personal factors likely influence writers before economic developments would, Mr. Stein said. With John Cheever, for example, "You're dealing with someone who's wrestling with alcoholism and latent homosexuality - every writer I know has some version of that," he said, adding that it was difficult to conceive of having "so much data that you can factor out everybody's drinking problem, everybody's prostate cancer, everybody's lumpectomy." Anne Bernays, who has written 10 novels, said most novels were not "happy books" anyway. They're about conflict and tension and about misery. Her first book, "Short Pleasures," published in 1962, did not reflect the positive economy of the 1950s, she pointed out. Among its lines are: "It was hopeless. I began to cry. And her newest book, "The Man on The Third Floor," was published in 2012, but takes place in the 1950s. Some writers could cite a book or two that tracked with the study's results. Ms. Smiley's "Horse Heaven," published in 2000, reflected 1990s prosperity, focusing on horse racing culture, she said. But most of her other works developed because she was "driven by a particular subject, and you write about it no matter what." Mr. Lee's just-published novel, "On Such a Full Sea," is a dystopian futuristic tale woven around three stratified social classes. "That's clearly an anxiety that I've been mulling over, my sense that there's a sort of skewing of income equality," he said. But with his 1995 novel "Native Speaker," about a Korean-American immigrant's experience, Mr. Lee said he did not see a connection to the previous decade's economy. "In 1985 I was in college, in my little cocoon," he said. If "Native Speaker" were to reflect that era, "It should have been about beer."