Personality Concepts in Early 20th-Century American Literature: Examining the Novels of F. Scott Fitzgerald

There is an emerging interest in psychology in examining personality in history, yet the implicit personality models of past historical periods have received little attention. Drawing upon the lexical hypothesis, this study examined the personality concepts and implicit model of personality in early 20th-century American literature, focusing on the novels by F. Scott Fitzgerald. A list of 1710 personality-descriptive adjectives and 100 marker terms of the Big Five model were used to code the descriptions of the novels’ characters (N = 169). Exploratory factor analysis identified a seven-factor structure that could be interpreted with reference to the cultural-historical context of the novels, encompassing themes of dynamism, agility, expressivity, self-regulation and social-relational functioning. Direct comparisons with structures obtained using the same list of words in contemporary self-ratings and in similar text-based analyses of 19th-century English novels from earlier research indicated overall low congruence. Still, some correspondence with the Big Five was observed at the level of marker scales of individual factors, and there was some qualitative similarity of some factors with those of the earlier authors’ models. The findings are discussed with reference to the potential of the presented approach to advance the study of personality structure in history.