In 1929, psychologist John M. Stalnaker and anthropologist Fred Eggan applied their knowledge of data collection in the social sciences to the field of literature. In “American Novelists Ranked: A Psychological Study,” published in the English Journal, Stalnaker and Eggan established their purpose to “rank a group of American novelists according to their literary merit” (295). As part of their study, they noted a growing public interest in such rankings, including lists of best sellers in newspapers and magazines, annual collections of the “best” short stories, and other markers of distinction like book prizes and the Book-of-the-Month Club selections. But what criteria should influence such rankings, and what method of evaluation should be employed? To gather their data, Stalnaker and Eggan presented notable authors and literary critics with a list of seventy-two authors and asked them to develop a 1 to 10 scale ranking all authors of the same quality with the same number. Thirty-one critics replied. These included Van Wyck Brooks, known at that time for his criticism on Mark Twain, Henry James, and Ralph Waldo Emerson; Fanny Butcher, a book critic for the Chicago Tribune; author Upton Sinclair; Henry Seidel Canby, a Yale professor and the founder and editor of the Saturday Review of Literature; Burton Rascoe, the literary editor at the New York Tribune; folklorist and linguist Louise Pound (a former college friend of Cather’s who would go on to become the first female president of the Modern Language Association in the 1950s); and Joseph Wood Krutch, Mark Van Doren, and Dorothy Van Doren, all involved in the Nation.

In terms of criteria, Stalnaker and Eggan left the parameters for their critics quite broad. The researchers asked their participating critics to rank authors based on their “general literary merit, as evidenced by their novels” (299, italics original). Stalnaker and Eggan suggested that “morality, sales popularity, style, entertaining qualities, ‘pure beauty,’ historical importance, or value as a psychological document,” could be considered as possible points of evaluation.