Nabokov's Favorite Word Is Mauve

Data meets literature in this “enlightening” ( The Wall Street Journal ), “brilliant” ( The Boston Globe ), “Nate Silver-esque” ( O, The Oprah Magazine ) look at what the numbers have to say about our favorite authors and their masterpieces. There’s a famous piece of writing advice—offered by Ernest Hemingway, Stephen King, and myriad writers in between—not to use -ly adverbs like “quickly” or “angrily.” It sounds like solid advice, but can we actually test it? If we were to count all the -ly ad