Novel

A novel is a long, fictional book, almost always divided into smaller units, or chapters. The word has the same origin as the word "novel" meaning new. Therefore, it can be said that a "new novel" is a tautology.

The eleventh century The Tale of Genji, by Japanese author Murasaki Shikibu, has been described as the world's first novel.^[1] The first modern European novel was Don Quixote de La Mancha (1605), written in Spanish by Miguel de Cervantes.

A very short novel (say between 20,000 and 50,000 words) is sometimes called a "novella." Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, consisting of about 38,000 words, is an example.

Word length of long novels[edit]

Here are the word lengths of notable long novels:^[2]

• Les Miserables, by Victor Hugo – 530,982 words

• Bleak House, by Charles Dickens – 360,947 words
• Great Expectations, by Charles Dickens – 183,349 words

• War and Peace, by Leo Tolstoy – 561,304 words
• Anna Karenina, by Leo Tolstoy – 349,736 words

• Gone with the Wind, by Margaret Mitchell – 418,053 words

• Moby Dick, by Herman Melville – 206,052 words

• For Whom the Bell Tolls, by Ernest Hemingway – 174,106 words

• Jane Eyre, by Charlotte Brontë – 183,858 words
• Sense and Sensibility, by Jane Austen – 126,194 words

• Catch-22, by Joseph Heller – 174,269 words

• Atlas Shrugged, by Ayn Rand – 561,996 words

• Crime and Punishment, by Fyodor Dostoyevsky – 211,591 words

• The Grapes of Wrath, by John Steinbeck – 169,481 words

• Ulysses, by James Joyce – 265,222 words

American[edit]

• F. Scott Fitzgerald
• Ernest Hemingway
• Herman Melville
• Lew Wallace
• James Fenimore Cooper
• Tom Wolfe
• Jack London
• Henry James
• Henry Miller
• Charles Bukowski
• Chuck Palahniuk
• David Foster Wallace
• Edith Wharton
• Harper Lee
• Harriet Beecher Stowe
• J.D. Salinger
• John Updike
• John Dos Passos
• John Steinbeck
• Mark Twain
• Margaret Mitchell
• Joseph Heller
• Kurt Vonnegut
• Ray Bradbury
• William Faulkner
• Sinclair Lewis
• Isaac Asimov
• Stephen King
• Louisa May Alcott
• Nathaniel Hawthorne
• Norman Mailer
• Pearl Buck
• Philip Roth
• Toni Morrison
• Truman Capote
• William S. Burroughs
• James Michener

Irish[edit]

• James Joyce
• Samuel Beckett

French[edit]

• ‘’Red and Black’’, (‘’Le Rouge et le Noir’’), Stendhal (1830)
• ‘’Pierre Goriot‘’, (‘’Le Père Goriot’’), Honoré de Balzac (1835)
• The Count of Monte-Cristo’’, (‘’Le Comte de Monte-Cristo’’), Alexandre Dumas (1844)
• ‘’Madame Bovary’’ Gustave Flaubert (1857)
• Les Misérables, Victor Hugo (1862)
• ‘’Voyage to the Centre of the Earth’’ (‘’Voyage Au Centre de la Terre’’), Jules Verne (1864)
• ‘’Germinal’’, Emile Zola (1877).
• ‘'Green Wheat’’ (‘’Le Blé en Herbe,’’) Colette (1923).
• ‘’In Search of Lost Time‘’ (‘’A la Recherche du Temps Perdu’’), Marcel Proust (1927)
• ‘’Journey to the Edge of the Night (‘’Voyage au bout de la nuit’’), Céline (1932)
• Nausea’’ (‘’La Nausée’'), Jean-Paul Sartre (1938)
• The Plague (La Peste) Albert Camus (1947)

Russian[edit]

• Leo Tolstoy
• Fyodor Dostoevsky
• Boris Pasternak

German[edit]

• Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
• Thomas Mann

British[edit]

• Daniel Defoe
• Henry Fielding
• Jane Austen
• Walter Scott
• Charlotte Brontë
• Emily Brontë
• Charles Dickens
• George Eliot
• Thomas Hardy
• George Gissing
• Joseph Conrad
• Dorothy Richardson
• Virginia Woolf
• D. H. Lawrence
• John Cowper Powys
• Aldous Huxley
• George Orwell
• Graham Greene

Canadian^[3][edit]

• Margaret Laurence
• Margaret Atwood
• Michael Ondaatje

See also[edit]

• Word counts of popular books

References[edit]