EXAMPLE 1.31

Do poets die young? According to William Butler Yeats, “She is the Gaelic muse, for she gives inspiration to those she persecutes. The Gaelic poets die young, for she is restless, and will not let them remain long on earth.” One study designed to investigate this issue examined the age at death for writers from different cultures and genders.²²

Three categories of writers examined were novelists, poets, and nonfiction writers. We examine the ages at death for female writers in these categories from North America. Figure 1.15 shows modified side-by-side boxplots for the three categories of writers.

Displaying the boxplots for the three categories of writers lets us compare the three distributions. We see that nonfiction writers tend to live the longest, followed by novelists. The poets do appear to die young! There is one outlier among the nonfiction writers, which is plotted individually along with the value of its label. This writer died at the age of 40, young for a nonfiction writer, but not for a novelist or a poet!