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.

## Contents

* 1 Word length of long novels
* 2 American
* 3 Irish
* 4 French
* 5 Russian
* 6 German
* 7 British
* 8 Canadian[3]
* 9 See also
* 10 References

## 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]

1. ↑ "The Tale of Genji: The world’s first novel?"
2. ↑ https://blog.fostergrant.co.uk/2017/08/03/word-counts-popular-books-world/
3. ↑ "Famous Canadian novelists