Longest novel ever written: the longest novels ranked by word count

The longest novel ever written, by the measure Guinness World Records uses, is Marcel Proust's À la recherche du temps perdu (In Search of Lost Time): an estimated 9,609,000 characters, spaces included, or about 1.27 million words in French. Count words instead, and on Wikipedia's list of long novels one book beats it: Madeleine de Scudéry's Artamène ou le Grand Cyrus, ten volumes published between 1649 and 1653, at roughly two million words.

Below is a ranking of the longest novels by word count, with where each number comes from and which ones nobody has sourced, because most are estimates and the method changes the answer. Then come how word counts are made, what this ranking accepts as one novel, the longest novels in English, and popular long classics. The formats the ranking leaves out, from oral epics and series to a web serial past 15 million words, are in the longest book ever written. Leaving them out here follows the list's publishing rules; it isn't a verdict on whether they are novels.

The longest novels, ranked by words

The table takes every novel on Wikipedia's List of longest novels, which covers novels of more than 500,000 words, whose word count isn't flagged as needing a citation, and adds one more that Standard Ebooks has counted. Where two figures exist, both are shown. Rows are sorted by the highest figure reported for each novel, so where ranges overlap or a figure has no source, the order is approximate.

Read the right-hand column before the middle one. Only a handful of these numbers are full counts of a text: Standard Ebooks' counts, an ebook store's counts, the Proust study and a word counter run over an online edition. The rest are estimates, an author's own tally, or figures nobody has sourced, and they move the order. Clarissa's range overlaps the unsourced estimate for Kelidar, Women and Men's range crosses four other titles, and Remembrance Rock is thirteenth on Carl Sandburg's own count but would be twenty-second on the ebook's. Below the top two, treat every place as approximate.

Three patterns stand out in this selection. The top two are French. Most of the English entries were published in the twentieth century. And War and Peace, the book many people name first, sits nineteenth here.

Where the word counts come from

Besides the unsourced ones, six kinds of figure turn up in that table, and they are not equally good.

• A count of a full digital text. Standard Ebooks publishes a count for every book it produces: 934,596 words for Clarissa, 563,500 for the Maude translation of War and Peace. The Artamène figure of 1,954,300 came from running the Unix word-count command, wc, over the University of Chicago's ARTFL online edition, according to Wikipedia's article on the novel, and an ebook store's count is the same kind of number. These are the most reliable figures here, with one catch: each measures one edition.
• A published estimate. Clarissa's 984,870 looks exact and is an estimate, about 50,000 words above Standard Ebooks' full count. The list labels it a 1964 New York Times figure, but the source it cites is a 1962 newspaper column by Hal Boyle, which shows how a number travels once it is in print.
• The author's own count. Sandburg put Remembrance Rock at 673,000 words. An ebook count gives 532,030, about 141,000 fewer.
• The publisher's figure. The 645,000 for Atlas Shrugged is an estimate given by its publisher and by The New York Times; Rand herself cited the printer's count.
• A newspaper's estimate. …And Ladies of the Club is listed at 600,000, an estimate from a 1984 review in Washington Post Book World.
• Characters, not words. Guinness counts characters, every space included, which sidesteps arguments about what a word is. Arno Schmidt's Zettels Traum appears as 6.8 million characters and an estimated 1.1 million words. Japanese is written without spaces between words, so the list gives Minoru Kawakami's light novel Horizon in the Middle of Nowhere 7 as up to 1,890,672 characters and converts that to roughly 859,000 English words. It is left out of the ranking above because the conversion is the list's own.

Translation and editing move every total. Here are the same novels counted more than once.

The Proust rows are the odd pair. Scott Moncrieff died before he finished, and the last part was translated by Sydney Schiff, writing as Stephen Hudson. That part is still under US copyright, so Standard Ebooks' edition stops at six parts and says it will add the seventh after the copyright expires, which it expects next year. Six parts in English already come within about 51,000 words of the whole novel in French.

That figure probably runs high. Chapter openings, part titles and short last pages hold fewer words than a full page, and only counting those too would say by how much. That is roughly how page-based estimates are made, and why they deserve the word “about.” If you cite one, say how it was made.

What counts as one novel

Every ranking has to decide what a single novel is, and the two sources this page relies on decide differently.

Guinness's record is simply for the published novel with the most characters. It accepts a novel published in many volumes and calls Proust's a work of 13 volumes, though the novel is usually counted in seven parts.

Wikipedia's list is stricter and spells its rules out. A novel must be a single work from a mainstream publisher that acquired the rights. It may run to several volumes if the author regarded it as one novel. The list leaves out self-published and print-on-demand books, vanity editions, unpublished manuscripts such as Henry Darger's, series such as Trollope's Chronicles of Barsetshire, cycles such as Harry Potter, and record-grabbing stunts. These are rules about how a book was published and grouped, not about what a novel is: a serial or a self-published book left off the list may still be a novel. The rules settle most arguments for the list and leave a few open:

• Sequences. Jean-Christophe is on the list as one novel. Jules Romains's 27-volume Men of Good Will is not.
• Books inside series. The Vicomte de Bragelonne is the last of Dumas's d'Artagnan romances and is often split into several books in English, the last of them The Man in the Iron Mask. Counted whole, as Standard Ebooks publishes it, it runs 713,211 words, more than any edition of War and Peace, yet it is missing from the list.
• Serials and self-described giants. Mohiuddin Nawab's Devta ran monthly in a Pakistani digest for 33 years, and Mark Leach describes his Marienbad My Love as 17 million words. Neither is on the list; the companion post on the longest book ever written covers both.
• Unsourced figures. Karl Ove Knausgård's six-volume My Struggle appears on the list at an estimated million words, but the figure is flagged as needing a citation, so it is left out of the ranking here, as are the flagged counts for Riccardo Bacchelli's Il mulino del Po and Stefano D'Arrigo's Horcynus Orca. Péter Nádas's Parallel Stories is on the list with no figure at all.

The longest novels in English

Clarissa is the longest English-language novel in this selection, on either count: 934,596 words in Standard Ebooks' full text, 984,870 on the older estimate. Samuel Richardson told it entirely in letters, so the longest English novel here is also an epistolary novel.

After it come mostly twentieth-century books, several of them known only by estimates: Xavier Herbert's Poor Fellow My Country at 852,000, Joseph McElroy's Women and Men and Madison Cooper's Sironia, Texas at 840,000 to 850,000 on their higher estimates, Marguerite Young's Miss MacIntosh, My Darling somewhere between 576,000 and 750,000. The firmest modern figures are the ebook counts, such as 593,674 for Vikram Seth's A Suitable Boy. The oldest English entry after Clarissa has the length of a serial, which is what it was: Varney the Vampire came out anonymously in penny-dreadful pamphlets from the publisher Edward Lloyd between 1845 and 1847, and runs to 667,000 words. For the same books measured in pages, which tells you about their editions more than their length, see the companion post.

Popular long classics

Few readers will open Artamène, but plenty start War and Peace. These are some of the longest well-known novels in Standard Ebooks' catalog, all counted the same way and timed at 260 words a minute, the average for fiction in Marc Brysbaert's 2019 meta-analysis of reading speed.

Dickens is the shelf's heavyweight, with four of the sixteen. And some neighbors are pure coincidence: in Constance Garnett's English, Anna Karenina and The Brothers Karamazov come within 450 words of each other. For more ordinary lengths, from Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde up, see the word counts of famous books.

What the longest novels share

Few of the books at the top of the ranking reached their first readers as one object. Artamène came out in ten volumes, Clarissa in seven, Proust's novel in seven parts from 1913 to 1927, the last three after his death. Varney the Vampire appeared over three years. Kelidar fills ten volumes in its 1984 edition. The rare single-volume giant is the exception the list points out: Zettels Traum, which it describes as the longest novel in one volume, at 1,536 pages in Suhrkamp's 2010 edition.

For a writer, that is the useful pattern. Length on this scale is managed in parts, and each part has to hold up on its own. None of it is a model for a debut, where agents ask for roughly 70,000 to 100,000 words for most adult fiction (the ranges are in how many words is a novel). Take 90,000 words as a typical length, and Proust's novel equals about fourteen of them, Artamène more than twenty. But a long book in parts brings the same bookkeeping at any size: a minor character renamed in part two, a date that no longer adds up, a manuscript that has outgrown anyone's memory of it. A series bible keeps names, dates and places straight across the parts.

If you draft in Strokes, you can also ask the Strokes Assistant to review a part or the whole project for slips like the character who is thirty-four in chapter two and thirty-one in chapter twenty.