Book Lengths, Well Known Novels

[Shoe]

While cleaning up bookmarks I came across this summary from HP titled "Average Book Length: Guess How Many Words Are In A Novel" and thought I'd share it. (The median book length on Amazon is 64,500.)


“Animal Farm”

29,966 words (75% of books have more words)

“Ethan Frome”

30,191 words (75% of books have more words)

“The Crying of Lot 49”

46,573 words (64% of books have more words)

“Slaughterhouse-Five”

47,192 words (64% of books have more words)

“We Have Always Lived in the Castle”

53,510 words (58% of books have more words)

“Lord of the Flies”

62,481 words (51% of books have more words)

“Brave New World”

64,531 words (50% of books have more words)

“The Adventures of Tom Sawyer”

70,570 words (45% of books have more words)

“Portnoy’s Complaint”

78,535 words (41% of books have more words)

“Lolita”

112,473 words (21% of books have more words)

“Madame Bovary”

117,963 words (18% of books have more words)

“Mansfield Park”

159, 344 words (9% of books have more words)

“Moby-Dick”

209,117 words (4% of books have more words)

“East of Eden”

226,741 words (3% of books have more words)

“Ulysses”

262,869 words (2% of books have more words)

“Middlemarch”

310,593 words (2% of books have more words)

“War and Peace”

544,406 words (0% of books have more words)

[Post-Doctorate D]

Poor Fellow My Country by Xavier Herbert clocks in at 852,000 words in English and was published in a single volume.

I've beaten East of Eden.  Next goal is 1,000,000 words.  ;)

[Joe Vasicek]

Very interesting. My longest novel is approximately 110k words, but if I wrote it today it would probably clock in around 70k or 80k. As I've learned how to write better, I find that I tend to write shorter, too. I once cut 20k words out of a 75k novel draft without removing any characters or subplots.

Someday, though, I hope to write a book as good as War and Peace. It is far easier to write a book as long as that masterpiece than it is to write something as good.