The 20 Longest Great Novels Ever Written

Sholokhov's epic of Don Cossacks through revolution and civil war — the 1965 Nobel and the most widely read Soviet novel of its era, though its authorship has been contested.

Dumas's 1844 novel of wrongful imprisonment and elaborate revenge — the supreme adventure novel and the template for every later revenge narrative.

Wolfe's tetralogy — a far-future dying Earth narrated by an unreliable torturer-apprentice; the most literary science fiction ever written, rewarding as much rereading as any novel of its era.

Tolkien's trilogy invented modern fantasy as a genre — a fully imagined world with its own languages and twenty centuries of history, still the most popular novel of the twentieth century.

Dickens's greatest novels — the most popular English novelist of any era, whose characters (Pip, Scrooge, Miss Havisham) have outlived most literary criticism of his work.

Wallace's 1996 thousand-page encyclopedic novel of a culture addicted to entertainment — the defining American novel of the 1990s and the final word on postmodern maximalism.

Undset's three-volume historical trilogy of fourteenth-century Norway — the 1928 Nobel-winning novel-cycle and the greatest medieval historical fiction ever written.

One of China's Four Great Classical Novels — a fourteenth-century historical epic that has shaped East Asian understanding of loyalty, strategy, and political cunning for six hundred years.

Bolaño's posthumous five-part novel — the feminicides of Ciudad Juárez at its vanishing center — the most acclaimed Spanish-language novel of the twenty-first century.

Martin du Gard's family saga through the First World War — the 1937 Nobel Prize, wide-ranging realism of a scale that few French novelists have since attempted.

Kipling's Mowgli tales and his novel of British India — the 1907 Nobel and the most vivid fiction of imperial India ever written, for better and worse.

Proust's four-thousand-page novel of memory, time, and Parisian society — the most thorough and exquisite act of self-examination ever set down in prose.

Poe invented the modern short story, the detective genre, and psychological horror — "The Raven," "Usher," "Rue Morgue," the founding American fantastical imagination.

Mann's 1924 novel uses a Swiss tuberculosis sanatorium as an allegory for pre-war Europe — humanism versus nihilism, reason versus decay, the old continent thinking its way toward ruin.

Fosse's seven-volume novel in unbroken minimalist prose — grief, art, and Catholic faith through the consciousness of an aging painter; the 2023 Nobel.

The first modern novel, the first novel about a novel, and the first comic masterpiece — Cervantes invented prose fiction's self-awareness in 1605 and no one has surpassed him since.

Eliot's novel of provincial English life — the book Virginia Woolf called "one of the few English novels written for grown-up people," and the deepest novel of nineteenth-century English fiction.

Pynchon's 1973 novel — the German V-2 rocket as the organizing principle of postwar civilization — the supreme achievement of postmodern fiction.

Sinclair Lewis's satires of American provincialism — in 1930 the first American to win the Nobel Prize in Literature; his diagnosis of middle-class conformity defined a genre.

Joyce's eighteen-chapter remake of The Odyssey set in Dublin on a single day in 1904 — the most ambitious and most quoted novel of the twentieth century.