Do You Have the “Author’s Forehead”? A Phrenology Check for Writers

Every writer knows the struggle of “finding their voice.” But in 1924, finding your voice wasn’t about endless practice, writing workshops, or MFA degrees—it was about finding the right bump on your forehead. Literally.

Welcome to Post #8 in our Character Reading series, where we dive deep into the peculiar world of Phrenology—the Victorian-era pseudoscience that refused to die even as the Roaring Twenties roared on. While modern neuroscience has thoroughly debunked the notion that brain function is determined by skull shape, the character analysts of the 1920s remained devoted believers. They were convinced that literary talent literally pressed the skull outward, creating telltale bumps that could predict whether you’d become the next Shakespeare or remain forever unpublished.

The Phrenology Phenomenon in Jazz Age America

By 1924, phrenology had already been around for over a century. The system was developed in the late 1790s by German physician Franz Joseph Gall, who proposed that the brain was composed of distinct “organs” responsible for different personality traits and intellectual faculties. His student, Johann Spurzheim, popularized the practice throughout Europe and America in the early 1800s.

Despite being rejected by mainstream science as early as the 1840s, phrenology found enthusiastic audiences well into the 20th century. The practice aligned perfectly with the self-improvement fervor of the Progressive Era and the optimistic self-determination culture of the 1920s. Americans of this era were obsessed with self-analysis, character building, and vocational guidance—and phrenology promised scientific certainty in an uncertain modern world.

The December 1924 issue of Character Reading magazine represents this fascinating cultural moment. World War I had ended just six years earlier, fundamentally reshaping American society. Women had won the right to vote in 1920. The country was experiencing unprecedented technological change with automobiles, radios, and motion pictures transforming daily life. In this whirlwind of modernity, Americans desperately sought tools to understand themselves and navigate their rapidly changing world.

“Find the Author in Yourself”: Literary Dreams Meet Skull Measurements

The article “Find the Author in Yourself” makes a bold claim that would have resonated with aspiring writers of the era: “There is a successful author lurking in everyone.” To unlock this hidden genius, you simply needed to measure your forehead with scientific precision. No need for talent, education, or years of practice—just the right cranial architecture.

This wasn’t mere metaphor. The phrenologists genuinely believed that when the “author faculty” developed in the brain, it would physically push against the inside of the skull, creating measurable prominences. A writer with a “full” center forehead supposedly possessed natural storytelling ability, while someone with a “sunken” forehead would struggle to organize narrative events no matter how hard they tried.

The democratizing promise of phrenology—that anyone could discover hidden talents through skull examination—made it particularly appealing during the 1920s literary boom. This was the decade of F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, and the Harlem Renaissance. Publishing was expanding, literacy rates were climbing, and the idea of the “professional writer” was becoming more accessible to middle-class Americans. Phrenology offered a shortcut: skip the hard work and just check your bumps.

The “Seven Rooms” of the Writer’s Brain: A Neurological Floor Plan

The article treats the brain like a Victorian mansion, complete with specific architectural requirements for literary success. According to this vintage guide, a great writer needed precise development in four key cranial “rooms” located across the center of the forehead:

1. Eventuality (The Historian’s Archive): Located directly in the center of your forehead, approximately one finger-width above the point between your eyebrows. Phrenologists considered this the “filing room” where raw observations transformed into cohesive stories. The article warns that if this area is “flat or hollow,” your plot organization would suffer catastrophically—you might start stories at the end or forget crucial narrative threads entirely. This faculty supposedly separated the natural storyteller from the mere observer.

2. Time (The Internal Chronometer): Positioned laterally from Eventuality, this bump determined your ability to sequence events properly. The 1924 article offers a particularly pointed warning: “Emotional women without a broad forehead at Time will tell us about things beginning at the end…” This reflected both the gender biases of the era and genuine concerns about narrative structure. Without proper “Time” development, phrenologists believed your stories would emerge as jumbled, chaotic messes—like a poorly timed automobile engine, cylinders firing out of sequence.

3. Tune (The Literary Musician): Located at the corners of the forehead where it rounds toward the temples. This wasn’t exclusively for musical ability—it represented the “music of literature” itself. A prominent Tune bump supposedly gave writers natural rhythm, flowing prose, and poetic cadence. The article notes that many people with strong Tune faculties weren’t musicians at all but rather poetry lovers who expressed their musical sense through words. This faculty determined whether your writing would sing or clunk along monotonously.

4. Locality (The Mental Atlas): Positioned above the eyebrows, this bump granted the power to transport readers through vivid descriptive writing. Whether depicting Boston or Tibet, writers with strong Locality could conjure any setting with equal authenticity. This faculty connected directly to the travel-writing boom of the 1920s, when Americans were increasingly mobile and hungry for exotic locations—even if only experienced through books.

Celebrity Case Studies: Famous Foreheads of the Jazz Age

The article strategically employs celebrity examples to validate its claims—a marketing technique as common in 1924 as it is today:

Vicente Blasco Ibáñez (1867-1928), the Spanish novelist whose 1916 novel The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse became a massive international bestseller and groundbreaking 1921 film starring Rudolph Valentino, serves as Exhibit A. The article analyzes his photograph, noting his “full central forehead” as proof of his descriptive powers. His “high forehead” supposedly indicated inspiration and psychic development, while his “strong vital physique” explained his ability to complete ambitious novels. Even his upper lip—”held firmly down”—revealed his stick-to-itiveness, a crucial trait for writers drawn to “adventure, romance and travel.”

Charlie Chaplin (1889-1977), at the height of his silent film stardom in 1924, receives particular attention not merely as a performer but as a writer. The article observes that “the sublime and the ridiculous are the closest of neighbors” in Chaplin’s brain architecture, visible in his forehead development. This supposedly explained his genius for tragicomedy—the ability to blend pathos and humor that made films like The Kid (1921) and The Gold Rush (1925) so revolutionary. The phrenological reading positioned Chaplin as evidence that creative writing extended beyond the printed page to cinematic storytelling.

These weren’t arbitrary choices. Both men were international celebrities in 1924, representing different aspects of literary success—Ibáñez as the traditional novelist and Chaplin as the new media storyteller. Their inclusion gave phrenology a veneer of modern relevance.

The Mirror Test: Discovering Your Inner Hemingway

The article concludes with a call to action perfectly pitched to its audience: “So, go look in the mirror. Is your central forehead full? Do your temples round out at the corners? You might just be the next Great American Novelist.”

This was phrenology’s greatest appeal—the promise of instant self-knowledge through simple observation. No expensive consultations needed (though phrenological readings were certainly available for a fee). Just a mirror, your fingers for measurement, and the diagrams provided in the magazine. The democratization of literary assessment, delivered directly to your home for the price of a magazine subscription.

Of course, we now understand that skull shape has absolutely no correlation with writing ability, personality traits, or cognitive function. Modern neuroscience has thoroughly debunked phrenology, revealing it as a pseudoscientific system built on wishful thinking, confirmation bias, and often racist assumptions about cranial differences between populations.

Yet examining these historical artifacts reveals something valuable: the timeless human desire to understand our hidden potentials and the lengths we’ll go to find shortcuts to creative success. Whether through phrenological bumps in 1924 or personality tests today, we remain fascinated by systems that promise to decode our innate abilities.

📖 Want to explore more vintage pseudoscience wisdom? Download the complete high-resolution scans of the original Character Reading Magazine (Dec/Jan 1924-1925) and discover all the peculiar personality tests, character analyses, and self-improvement advice from the Roaring Twenties. Get the full magazine in museum-quality resolution!

Original text: Find the Author in Yourself

(Transcribed from the December 1924 Issue of Character Reading)

Find the Author in Yourself

[Diagram Top Left: A face with forehead zones labeled]

1. MEMORY OR EVENTUALITY. 2-LOCALITY. 3-TIME. 4-TUNE. [Labels on eyes: LANGUAGE]

[Photo Caption – Center] The full central forehead of Vicente Blasco Ibanez, author of the “Four Horsemen,” and other famous novels, gives him his great descriptive power. His high forehead shows inspiration and psychic development, while his strong vital physique enables him to finish his labors—to give them warmth and color. His upper lip held firmly down tells us that he will be able to add firmness and sticktuitiveness to his work—a thing very hard for the writer loving adventure, romance and travel.

[Main Article Text] THERE is a successful author lurking in everyone. The author in some of us is covered by a shell, and in others he is very near the surface.

When he comes up near the surface he clamors to write and to express himself so much that he presses out the skull in the center of the forehead across to the outer eyebrows.

Put your finger on your forehead right between the eyebrows. We learned in the last issue that this was the center of Individuality, the first center of our brain to work when we see objects about us, and how they differ from each other.

But what becomes of those thoughts about the things that are seen?

Whether we let them fall by the wayside, or whether we record them for future use depends on the Author in us. To find the home of this Author, put your finger, after your third finger has been placed on Individuality, right between the eyebrows, the distance of your own finger’s width above this center.

Here we find the front door to the Author’s home. Do not be frightened away by the name above his

[Diagram Bottom Right: A circular chart labeled “ENERGY” in the center] [Sectors and visible text:] MORALS – ETHICS: BENEVOLENCE, VENERATION, SPIRITUALITY, HOPE, CONSCIENTIOUSNESS. ART – ESTHETICS: SUBLIMITY, IMITATION, IDEALITY. INTELLECT: HUMAN NATURE, AGREEABLENESS, CONSTRUCTIVENESS, MIRTHFULNESS, CAUSALITY, COMPARISON, EVENTUALITY, TUNE, TIME, LOCALITY, LANGUAGE, CALCULATION, ORDER, COLOR, WEIGHT, SIZE, FORM, INDIVIDUALITY. COMMERCIAL: ACQUISITIVENESS, SECRETIVENESS. VITALITY: COMBATIVENESS, ALIMENTIVENESS, BIBATIVENESS, VITATIVENESS, AMATIVENESS. SOCIAL: FRIENDSHIP, PARENTAL LOVE, CONJUGALITY. WILL – STABILITY: SELF ESTEEM, FIRMNESS, CONTINUITY.

[Caption below Diagram] Your faculties may be compared to radio dial. Turn the knob and tune in on Vitality, Intellect, or what you will.

door. It is called “Eventuality.” Some authorities call this Author faculty Experience. Entering this door we find that it is a filing room of the Author’s house, where he records the experiences and the things which he has seen by the areas in the eyebrow region below.

These areas along the eyebrow region, namely, Individuality which identifies and separates objects, Form, which sees their shapes, Size which gives their dimensions, Weight their density, Color their hues, Order their arrangement, Number their count—all these are recorded into little stories, and become EXPERIENCES to us, in the room in the center of the forehead called Eventuality or Experience.

Authorship consists of events or experiences, to a very great extent.

If our Author’s room is small or undeveloped the things that we see are not retained as experiences, hence we cannot give them out in story form. We may remember them, but we do not build one thing upon another so that it becomes a story.

Eventuality is the history center. It automatically registers the logical order of impressions seen by the perceptives below. We may call the Perceptives below, the stone steps and the foundation to the Author’s home, because it is here he gets his first facts, and if they are correct, and the door above, Eventuality, is also well developed we get accurate facts, embellished with romance and entertainment.

[Photo Caption – Top Right (Charlie Chaplin)] The sublime and the ridiculous are the closest of neighbors in the human brain. Note the literary faculties well developed in the face of Charlie Chaplin.

[Column 2 Text] Sometimes we find an author whose Perceptives are very, very strong—so strong that the area above, running across the center of the forehead seems sunken in.

Such a writer will write history, text books, or science in a solid, matter of fact way.

But when the center of the forehead is fuller all those facts become stories—experiences—dramatics, to catch and hold the attention by their emotional interest.

Suppose now, that the eyebrow region is not very well developed, and the whole central forehead juts out prominently. Such an individual, writer or not, fails to state his facts correctly and in order, because his foundation for gathering those facts was defective. The stone steps leading to his literary room are unstable, and when he tells us something in writing or by mouth the emotional interest is there, and the story may have some high spots in it—it may be full of sweet saccharine religious phrases, but it will have no solid meaning. His literary house shakes with the wind. The reader or listener cannot secure orderly facts or build a philosophy of his own from such narrations. (Continued on Page 24.)

[Photo Caption – Bottom Left (Adela Rogers St. John)] The curved eyebrows of Adela Rogers St. John, the popular story writer, tell us of her intuition. Her wide cheek bones tell us of her nervous energy, fondness for motion and variety, while her full central forehead brands her for the successful literary person that she is.

[Image: Profile photograph of a woman with leaves in her hair]Caption: Note the full central forehead of Laurette Taylor, indicating dramatics and literature.

(Continued from Page 13.)

We see the sunken eyebrow region, and the full central forehead in the baby, the young negro, or in those individuals who live totally in their emotions, believe everything they see and hear, responding only to things they like and not to fundamental truths, or scientific principles.

The full central forehead is dramatic, if the person has good expressive ability. It reads much, and likes love stories, romance, adventure.

We may consider the full central forehead at the faculty of Eventuality, the center of memory, though memory also depends on the chemicals leading in the body make-up. The man with larger bones more prominent in his make-up than muscle or fat has a tenacious memory, because the tenacious chemical calcium retains the things he learns in the rocky substance of himself. The man or woman with black hair, black eyes and dark white skin, who takes up a great deal of the element nitrogen, likewise has an eternal memory. Such chemical types, however, do not express, the things they remember, as fluently as do other types, though they remember them longer. They are not as dramatic over them.

As we move our finger through the center of the forehead, across from each outer eyebrow, we will understand why the actress, the very fluent speaker, and the emotional writer must have a good development of the brain all the way across this center line.

First, from the central faculty Eventuality, the actor, writer or speaker remembers events in their order, remembers the grammatical changes of verbs so that he can tell about them.

Second, along this central line, and above the center of the eyebrows we find the faculty Locality, which causes him to remember where these events took place. Give him the word Boston, and he immediately winds a story around it. People with small Locality do not like to be dragged around to visit places of interest, hence their travel qualities are not well developed. The speaker and actor, however, like romance, travel, change, and variety, and they associate the places where they have been with the excitement of the experience.

Third, the author must have in his writing home a good development of the faculty of Time.

Any of us who have stayed around a garage listening to a motor whose timing apparatus is not adjusted, allowing the cylinders in the motor to explode at random instead of in a methodical, even way, one after another, can readily see why some of us without a good development of the Time faculty do everything hit or miss.

The author must have Time well developed to put the events in his stories together in the right place, and at the right time—in succession.

Emotional women without a broad forehead at Time will tell us about things beginning at the end and expecting us to know by intuition, all about the beginning. They will tell us anything but the exact way things happened, not because they want to evade the truth, but because they start at the wrong place in their telling of the story.

When we have too much sulphur in our bodies, as evidenced by red hair, reddish tinted light hair, and very sensitive skin, this valuable faculty of Time is often affected, and we are an hour late for an appointment, or else we forget it entirely, or are not accurate in even remembering whether it was ten o’clock or twelve.

People with active Time are always asking children how old they are—forever consulting a watch, or thinking a great deal about dates in history, birthdays, anniversaries, etc.

This faculty highly developed can wake up at any preappointed hour, telling the time of day or night by intuition as correctly as by a watch.

“Everyone was out of step but Jim,” sang the old war song. But Jim was weak in the Time center of his brain, and could not gauge the time from one step to another.

Tune is another room in the author’s house which must be well lighted with development. This room (Continued on Page 33.)

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Find the Author in Yourself (Continued from Page 24.)

must be large enough to cause a broad forehead at the point where it rounds off to the side head.

The author and the musician both spend much time in this room, for in it they manufacture the rhythm of both music and words. The elocutionist also must possess width to the forehead in the center line across, or his voice is monotonous, drawling, and grating, lacking in a flowing tone or musical cadences.

People with sensitive brains at Tune know us by our step a great distance away. The voice is musical, and the ear round with a large auditory canal, and very often a very thin rim.

We find quite often that individuals with wide foreheads at Tune, when asked if they are musical or very appreciative of music, will answer that they are not. Invariably they will be great poetry lovers, however. Instead of using their Tune in musical notes of a violin or piano, they will express this faculty in the appreciation of music in words, on which real literature depends.

Mistakes in English cause suffering to people whose faculty of Tune is very well developed, because those mistakes are “out of harmony” with the music of literature. We find also, many well educated people who seemingly never learn to speak correctly in every way, but when we examine their foreheads we find a negative development at Tune. They cannot remember sounds perfectly.

A large development of Tune gives excessive fondness for music, either in notes or words, consequently Tune is an essential room in the author’s home.

Language, or expressive ability, which causes fullness below and above the eyes belongs to the author who writes emotional stories, poems, biographies, with much human interest. It is easier for such an author to express himself than it is for the writer whose eyes do not possess this fullness. There are many writers, however, whose material consists of mathematical, scientific data who do not possess this fullness, or expressive ability. Their deep set eyes reflect the habit of their brains to retire into themselves, expressing not personality, human interest, or emotion, but cold facts and figures.

📖 Want to explore more vintage pseudoscience wisdom? Download the complete high-resolution scans of the original Character Reading Magazine (Dec/Jan 1924-1925) and discover all the peculiar personality tests, character analyses, and self-improvement advice from the Roaring Twenties. Get the full magazine in museum-quality resolution!