`Primary Colors' Author Fingered By Computer

The anonymity of Anonymous suffered a blow yesterday with disclosure of a computer analysis that indicated the author of the No. 1 fiction best-seller "Primary Colors" is Newsweek writer Joe Klein.

The identification of Klein, to be published in the issue of New York Magazine going on sale Monday, was developed by Donald Foster, the Vassar College professor of English who recently set the authoritative Modern Language Association on its ear by identifying a previously obscure elegy as the work of William Shakespeare.

Foster used the same "attributional-study" techniques to identify Klein.

His computer runs did cross-correlations of the novel's text with hundreds of thousands of words from other writings by Klein and more than a dozen others who have been mentioned as possible authors of "Primary Colors," a novel about the 1992 Clinton presidential campaign.

The data led Foster to conclude: "Joe Klein wrote this book, or else it's an almost impossibly clever hoax by someone who wanted his work to be taken for Joe Klein's."

Klein has repeatedly dodged the question of authorship, and he could not be reached for comment.

Klein had been political writer for New York Magazine before moving to Newsweek.

"Primary Colors" is a fast-moving novel written in the voice of a narrator who in the story is Clinton's press secretary. It is mainly delivered in dialogue, much of it vulgar, cruel, colorful and disdainful of commonly accepted decencies and ethics.

Foster, in his work for New York Magazine, wrote that "while no single word or group of words establishes Klein's authorship, the profile of his active vocabulary forms a matrix closely matching that of Anonymous."

Foster says Klein "tends, for example, to use the same adverbs used habitually by Anonymous. . . ."