List of longest novels
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[edit] Longest novels in Latin or Cyrillic alphabets
The longest novels in Latin or Cyrillic alphabets include:
Henry Darger, The Story of the Vivian Girls
Illustrated fantasy novel manuscript typed single-spaced with 15,145 pages in 10 volumes. Discovered after Darger's death, the manuscript has never been published. The total number of words has been estimated; some believe this might be the longest novel ever written. [1] The most conservative guess will put this in the million-word realm, possibly into tens of millions.
Madeleine de Scudéry, Artamène
Published in ten volumes from 1649–53. It contains 2.1 million words[citation needed]. Available online (in French only) at Artamene.org.
Marcel Proust, À la recherche du temps perdu
Longest conventionally-read novel. 9,609,000 characters [2], nearly 1.5 million words. Holds the Guinness Book of Records title as Longest Novel. Published in 13 volumes from 1913 to 1927. English translation is titled Remembrance of Things Past or In Search of Lost Time.
1.2 million words [3]. Published 1986 to 1988 as ten volumes.
Madison Cooper, Sironia, Texas
Published 1952. 1731 pages, originally published in two volumes. [4]Estimated at 1,100,000 words. [5]
Published 1748. First edition contains about 969,000 words. Third edition contains some 5,500,000 characters, over one million words [6]. Published in nine volumes. Conventionally regarded as the longest novel in the English language.
Anthony Powell, A Dance to the Music of Time
Published from 1951 to 1975, as a partial tribute to Proust. Published in 12 volumes, it is sometimes regarded as a novel sequence. At over 1 million words, it is a contender for the longest English-language novel ever written.
Xavier Herbert, Poor Fellow My Country
Published 1975. At 1463 pages and 850,000 words, it is the longest Australian novel. [7]
Marguerite Young, Miss MacIntosh, My Darling
Published 1965. Contains "some 700,000 words on 1,198 closely printed pages". [8]
Courtney Thomas, Walls of Phantoms
Contains some 627,000 words. Not yet published. [verification needed]
Alexandre Dumas, père, Le Vicomte de Bragelonne, ou Dix ans plus tard
Written in 1847. When published in English it was usually split into three parts The Vicomte de Bragelonne, Louise de la Valliere and The Man in the Iron Mask. Estimated at some 626,000 French words. [9] [10] [11]
Robert Musil, The Man Without Qualities
Published in three parts, two in 1930, the third after Musil's death in 1941. Unfinished at over 1700 pages.
Published 1993. 1488 pages softcover. 591,552 words. [12] The longest conventional novel in English since Clarissa.
Published 1957. 565,223 words.[13] 1274 pages.
Published from 1865 to 1869. Original text has some 460,000 Russian and French words. English translation contains over 560,000 words and over 3.1 million characters; typically over 1400 pages as a paperback.
Carl Sandburg, Remembrance Rock
Published 1948. 532,030 words. [14]
Published 1862. Nearly 513,000 French words. Unabridged French edition (ISBN 2070102645) 1779 pages (including essays).
[edit] Controversial entries
Novel cycles
It is difficult to ascertain whether novel cycles, like the aforementioned À la recherche du temps perdu and Baroque Cycle, should be considered a multi-volumed single novel by itself, or a series of novels, as in novel sequences. Some, like Proust's À la recherche du temps perdu or Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings, were clearly conceived as a single, unified work. Many romans fleuve produced in the last century are much harder to classify, including novel cycles like Romain Rolland's Jean Christophe (1904-12) and Dutch writer JJ Voskuils's Het Bureau (The Bureau, 1996-). The longest roman fleuve ever written is Jules Romains's Les Hommes de bonne volonté (Men of Good Will), produced in 27 volumes, each with a separate title, and published from 1932-46. If taken as a single piece of fiction, it would be a strong contender for the longest novel ever written. Popular fiction series about a single protagonist, with multiple authors, can dwarf such records: Perry Rhodan, a German series of novels about the eponymous space hero, can claim over 150 million words in over 2300 parts [15].
Simon Roberts: Knickers
Published in 2003, Knickers [16] contains a total of 14,156,074 characters (including spacings)[17]. Its claim to the title is somewhat dubious, however—although the work totals 2078 pages and 17 chapters, Chapter 14 ("Leap of Faith") consists of almost nothing but the word "thanks" repeated between pages 52 and 2069. The ploy appears to be an attempt merely to make it into the Guinness Book of Records. Although listed in 2003 on the Guinness Sheet of Literary Records, the record has since been withdrawn. A first edition printing was abandoned after three copies; plans for a second edition have been announced.
[edit] Longest novels in scripts other than Latin or Cyrillic
East Asian language, like Chinese or Japanese, are more compact in their written forms than their Western counterparts. As such these works are often lengthier in translations even if their character spacing required are the same as when compared to Cyrillic or Latin alpabets.
Sohachi Yamaoka, Tokugawa Ieyasu
This 40-volume historical novel was serialized from 1950-67. The completed novel contains over 10 million Japanese characters. It is not just the longest novel in the Japanese language, but also one of the longest in any language.
Nakazato Kaizan: Daibosatsu Toge
Published in 41 volumes and 1533 chapters, this historical novel was the longest in the Japanese language until Tokugawa Ieyasu. 5.7 million Japanese characters. [18]
Li Guiyu: Dream of the Pomegranate Flowers
Completed 1841. 4,838,400 Chinese characters. [19] Written in recitative verse, this is the longest narrative in the Chinese language, four times longer than A Dream of the Red Chamber. Critics differ in opinion whether to classify it as a novel or narrative poem.
Yang Guofu, Chuangshi Qiyuan
Projected at 4.2 million Chinese characters, this novel is completed but has not yet been published in its entirety. Once publishing is complete, it would be the longest Chinese-language prose novel published. The first volume was published in 2005. [20]
Yao Xueyin, Li Zhicheng
This historical novel, completed in 1999, has the distinction of being the longest modern Chinese-language novel printed, at 3.4 million Chinese characters. It was published in 5 volumes over 40 years.
Vilasini, Avakasikal
Reputedly the longest novel in any Indian language, Avakasikal was written in Malayalam, in which it runs into 3,958 pages, four volumes and took 10 years to complete. [21]
Cao Xueqin, Dream of the Red Chamber
Written in the 18th century. Currently published as a 120-chapter, five-book sequence, running over 2500 pages. [22] The incomplete English translation at Project Gutenberg contains over 440,000 words and over 2.4 million characters. At slightly over 1 million Chinese characters however, it is not even remotely the longest Chinese-language novel. (See above)
The 1999 Beijing edition (English translation) contains 4 volumes with a total of 2556 pages.
