Long Classics Over 300,000 Words: Free EPUB

Seventeen books on this site run past 300,000 words, which at 300 words a minute is more than seventeen hours of reading, and in practice much more. They are the books people plan around: War and Peace, Les Misérables, Decline and Fall, The Wealth of Nations.

The oldest is Montaigne’s Essays in 1580 and the newest is Malory in a 1934 edition, but the mass is Victorian: Pickwick, Copperfield, Bleak House, Our Mutual Friend are four of the seventeen, and three more are French or Russian novels of the same decades.

Every long classic on this shelf

Seventeen titles over 300,000 words, oldest first. The hours are honest arithmetic.

Year	Title	Author	Form	Words	Reading time
1485	Le Morte d’Arthur	Thomas Malory	Novel	350,000	19 h
1580	The Essays of Michel de Montaigne	Michel de Montaigne	Essays	517,000	29 h
1605	Don Quixote	Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra	Novel	423,624	24 h
1749	The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling	Henry Fielding	Novel	338,946	19 h
1776	The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire	Edward Gibbon	History	1,603,000	89 h
1776	The Wealth of Nations	Adam Smith	Political economy	389,724	22 h
1837	The Pickwick Papers	Charles Dickens	Novel	301,000	17 h
1844	The Count of Monte Cristo	Alexandre Dumas	Novel	466,000	26 h
1848	Vanity Fair	William Makepeace Thackeray	Novel	301,000	17 h
1850	David Copperfield	Charles Dickens	Novel	357,000	20 h
1853	Bleak House	Charles Dickens	Novel	351,226	20 h
1862	Les Misérables	Victor Hugo	Novel	551,000	31 h
1865	Our Mutual Friend	Charles Dickens	Novel	324,000	18 h
1869	War and Peace	Leo Tolstoy	Novel	562,000	31 h
1871	Middlemarch	George Eliot	Novel	316,280	18 h
1878	Anna Karenina	Leo Tolstoy	Novel	349,000	19 h
1880	The Brothers Karamazov	Fyodor Dostoevsky	Novel	349,000	19 h

How this list was made

The threshold is 300,000 words on the book page. Counting is done on the edition here, so the total for a translated work depends on the translator: Les Misérables in a different English version would move by tens of thousands.

Reading times assume 300 words a minute with no annotation, no notes and no rereading, which is the optimistic case. Plan for twice the number.

The seventeen titles share 7,849,800 words, or 436 hours — more than a working month of evenings. The range starts at 301,000 words (Vanity Fair) and ends at 1,603,000 (The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire), a 5-fold difference that explains why "a long classic" means very different things depending on who is saying it. thirteen authors wrote them between 1485 and 1880.

Questions readers ask

What is the longest book on the site?

The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, at about 1.5 million words, followed by Les Misérables and War and Peace in the half-million range.

How long does War and Peace take?

The table says about 33 hours. Most readers report three to six months at a chapter a day, which is a better plan than a weekend.

Should I read the long ones on a phone?

Any of the three formats works, but these are the books where chapter navigation matters most; the KEPUB files keep the internal links.

Part of all themed reading lists. Nearby shelves: Russian Classics · French Classics · American Classics · authors A–Z · word counts and reading times.