The 25 Shortest Classic Books: An Evening Each

The shortest classic here is The Gift of the Magi by O. Henry, at 2,130 words — under an hour at 300 words a minute. The twenty-five below add up to 296,768 words in total, less than The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire alone (1,603,000).

Short does not mean slight. This list includes a defence speech that decided how a trial is remembered, a ghost story that invented a Christmas, a manifesto, a poem, and several pieces of fiction that are short because their authors cut every sentence that could be cut. For anyone testing whether a classic suits them, these are the cheapest tests on the shelf.

Shortest first

The lightest titles in the catalogue, from 2,130 words up, with the reading time each one costs.

#	Title	Author	Year	Words	Reading time
1	The Gift of the Magi	O. Henry	1905	2,130	1 h
2	A Modest Proposal	Jonathan Swift	1729	3,467	1 h
3	An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge	Ambrose Bierce	1890	3,765	1 h
4	The Monkey’s Paw	W. W. Jacobs	1902	4,033	1 h
5	Songs of Innocence and of Experience	William Blake	1794	5,600	1 h
6	Sonnets from the Portuguese	Elizabeth Barrett Browning	1850	5,700	1 h
7	Doctor Faustus	Christopher Marlowe	1592	6,000	1 h
8	The Yellow Wallpaper	Charlotte Perkins Gilman	1892	6,052	1 h
9	The Fall of the House of Usher	Edgar Allan Poe	1839	6,909	1 h
10	Oedipus Rex	Sophocles	1912	12,000	1 h
11	The Legend of Sleepy Hollow	Washington Irving	1820	12,267	1 h
12	The Prophet	Kahlil Gibran	1923	12,447	1 h
13	The Communist Manifesto	Karl Marx	1848	14,000	1 h
14	The Enchiridion	Epictetus	125	14,119	1 h
15	The Art of Money Getting	P. T. Barnum	1880	14,300	1 h
16	Bartleby, the Scrivener	Herman Melville	1853	14,522	1 h
17	The Poetics	Aristotle	1895	14,977	1 h
18	Nature	Ralph Waldo Emerson	1836	15,400	1 h
19	The Happy Prince and Other Tales	Oscar Wilde	1888	16,085	1 h
20	De Profundis	Oscar Wilde	1913	17,754	1 h
21	A Midsummer Night’s Dream	William Shakespeare	1600	18,000	1 h
22	Macbeth	William Shakespeare	1623	18,000	1 h
23	Apology	Plato	c. 399 BC	19,000	1 h
24	The Song Celestial	Edwin Arnold	1885	20,000	1 h
25	The Captivity of Mary Rowlandson	Mary Rowlandson	1682	20,241	1 h

How this list was made

Word counts come from the book page of each edition, and reading time is words ÷ 18,000, rounded to the nearest hour with a minimum of one. Very short works therefore all show one hour; the word count is the honest number.

The list is drawn from the whole catalogue rather than from one genre, so a short story, a speech and a novel can sit next to each other. Nothing is excluded for being a play, an essay or a poem.

Questions readers ask

What is the shortest classic on editions.ink?

The Gift of the Magi by O. Henry, at 2,130 words in the edition offered here.

Can I finish one of these in an evening?

Yes — the whole list is under 17 hours of reading end to end. Each of the first ten is under an hour at 300 words a minute.

Are short classics still worth reading?

Several of the most quoted sentences in English are in works this short. Length is a cost, not a measure of quality; the list mixes fiction, philosophy and poetry for that reason.

Part of the complete catalogue. Nearby: the longest classics · the most filmed classics · short novels under 90,000 words · short classics under 50,000 words · themed reading lists · word counts and reading times.