  We present in this paper a numerical investigation of literary texts by
various well-known English writers, covering the first half of the twentieth
century, based upon the results obtained through corpus analysis of the texts.
A fractal power law is obtained for the lexical wealth defined as the ratio
between the number of different words and the total number of words of a given
text. By considering as a signature of each author the exponent and the
amplitude of the power law, and the standard deviation of the lexical wealth,
it is possible to discriminate works of different genres and writers and show
that each writer has a very distinct signature, either considered among other
literary writers or compared with writers of non-literary texts. It is also
shown that, for a given author, the signature is able to discriminate between
short stories and novels.
