Short Classics Under 50,000 Words: Free EPUB

Under 50,000 words is between one and three hours of reading, which is the most useful length on this site: long enough to be a book, short enough to finish tonight. Sixty-six titles qualify, from the Enchiridion of Epictetus to Winnie-the-Pooh.

The list is deliberately mixed. It has the two most quoted pamphlets in English (A Modest Proposal, Common Sense), the founding texts of three genres (The Castle of Otranto, A Study in Scarlet, The Time Machine), and a surprising number of plays, essays and poems that happen to be short.

Every short classic on this shelf

Sixty-six titles under 50,000 words, oldest first. Reading times are at 300 words a minute.

Year	Title	Author	Form	Words	Reading time
c. 429 BC	Oedipus Rex	Sophocles	Play	12,000	1 h
c. 399 BC	Apology	Plato	Dialogue	19,000	1 h
c. 385 BC	Symposium	Plato	Dialogue	35,600	2 h
c. 370 BC	Phaedrus	Plato	Dialogue	41,200	2 h
125	The Enchiridion	Epictetus	Treatise	14,119	1 h
1000	Beowulf	Anonymous	Epic poem	24,921	1 h
1532	The Prince	Niccolò Machiavelli	Political theory	31,000	2 h
1592	Doctor Faustus	Christopher Marlowe	Play	6,000	1 h
1600	A Midsummer Night’s Dream	William Shakespeare	Play	18,000	1 h
1600	Hamlet	William Shakespeare	Play	35,005	2 h
1623	Macbeth	William Shakespeare	Play	18,000	1 h
1637	Discourse on the Method	René Descartes	Treatise	26,100	1 h
1729	A Modest Proposal	Jonathan Swift	Pamphlet	3,467	1 h
1748	An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding	David Hume	Treatise	48,000	3 h
1759	Candide	Voltaire	Novel	38,738	2 h
1764	The Castle of Otranto	Horace Walpole	Novel	39,627	2 h
1774	The Sorrows of Young Werther	Johann Wolfgang von Goethe	Novel	42,000	2 h
1776	Common Sense	Thomas Paine	Pamphlet	22,127	1 h
1794	Songs of Innocence and of Experience	William Blake	Verse	5,600	1 h
1820	The Legend of Sleepy Hollow	Washington Irving	Novel	12,267	1 h
1836	Nature	Ralph Waldo Emerson	Essay	15,400	1 h
1839	The Fall of the House of Usher	Edgar Allan Poe	Novel	6,909	1 h
1843	A Christmas Carol	Charles Dickens	Novel	29,000	2 h
1845	Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass	Frederick Douglass	Slave narrative	41,000	2 h
1848	The Communist Manifesto	Karl Marx	Pamphlet	14,000	1 h
1850	Sonnets from the Portuguese	Elizabeth Barrett Browning	Verse	5,700	1 h
1853	Bartleby, the Scrivener	Herman Melville	Novel	14,522	1 h
1863	Utilitarianism	John Stuart Mill	Treatise	30,600	2 h
1864	Notes from the Underground	Fyodor Dostoevsky	Novel	44,161	2 h
1865	Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland	Lewis Carroll	Novel	27,000	2 h
1871	Through the Looking-Glass	Lewis Carroll	Novel	29,797	2 h
1872	Carmilla	Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu	Novel	28,083	2 h
1879	A Doll’s House	Henrik Ibsen	Play	26,000	1 h
1880	The Art of Money Getting	P. T. Barnum	Lecture	14,300	1 h
1883	The Adventures of Pinocchio	Carlo Collodi	Novel	42,000	2 h
1885	The Song Celestial	Edwin Arnold	Verse translation	20,000	1 h
1886	Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde	Robert Louis Stevenson	Novel	26,000	1 h
1887	A Study in Scarlet	Arthur Conan Doyle	Novel	43,000	2 h
1888	The Happy Prince and Other Tales	Oscar Wilde	Novel	16,085	1 h
1890	An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge	Ambrose Bierce	Novel	3,765	1 h
1890	The Sign of the Four	Arthur Conan Doyle	Novel	43,000	2 h
1892	The Yellow Wallpaper	Charlotte Perkins Gilman	Novel	6,052	1 h
1895	The Importance of Being Earnest	Oscar Wilde	Play	21,349	1 h
1895	The Red Badge of Courage	Stephen Crane	Novel	46,000	3 h
1895	The Time Machine	H. G. Wells	Novel	32,223	2 h
1896	The Island of Doctor Moreau	H. G. Wells	Novel	46,593	3 h
1897	The Invisible Man	H. G. Wells	Novel	49,000	3 h
1898	The Turn of the Screw	Henry James	Novel	41,876	2 h
1899	Heart of Darkness	Joseph Conrad	Novel	38,000	2 h
1900	The Wonderful Wizard of Oz	L. Frank Baum	Novel	39,409	2 h
1902	Just So Stories	Rudyard Kipling	Novel	34,000	2 h
1902	The Monkey’s Paw	W. W. Jacobs	Novel	4,033	1 h
1903	The Call of the Wild	Jack London	Novel	32,000	2 h
1905	The Gift of the Magi	O. Henry	Novel	2,130	1 h
1911	Ethan Frome	Edith Wharton	Novel	34,619	2 h
1911	Peter and Wendy	J. M. Barrie	Novel	47,000	3 h
1912	Aesop’s Fables	Aesop	Novel	40,000	2 h
1912	The Problems of Philosophy	Bertrand Russell	Treatise	45,900	3 h
1915	Metamorphosis	Franz Kafka	Novel	21,982	1 h
1915	The Thirty-Nine Steps	John Buchan	Novel	44,023	2 h
1916	Pygmalion	George Bernard Shaw	Play	36,598	2 h
1920	Thuvia, Maid of Mars	Edgar Rice Burroughs	Novel	46,000	3 h
1922	Siddhartha	Hermann Hesse	Novel	42,192	2 h
1923	The Prophet	Kahlil Gibran	Prose poems	12,447	1 h
1925	The Great Gatsby	F. Scott Fitzgerald	Novel	48,257	3 h
1926	Winnie-the-Pooh	A. A. Milne	Novel	21,382	1 h

How this list was made

The rule is arithmetic: a book is listed when the word count on its page is below 50,000. Nothing is included or excluded for taste, and the boundary is exact, so a revised edition could move a title off the list.

Reading times divide the count by 300 and round to the nearest hour, which is why several entries show one hour even when they differ by twenty minutes.

The list mixes thirteen forms rather than one: thirty-eight novels, eight plays, five treatises and a scatter of essays, pamphlets and poems. Titles run from The Gift of the Magi at 2,130 words to The Invisible Man at 49,000, from fifty-seven authors. The median sits near 28,000 words, about 2 minutes of reading, so nothing here needs a bookmark you cannot reach the end of in one sitting.

Questions readers ask

What is the shortest book here?

A Modest Proposal, at roughly 4,800 words. The Enchiridion and The Prophet are next, both under 15,000.

Is 50,000 words really a book?

In genre terms, yes: The Great Gatsby is about 47,000 and The Time Machine about 32,000. In publishing terms it is a novella, which is why they are quick.

Why are plays included?

Because the word count is what the page offers, and a play read silently takes about as long as a novella. The drama shelf lists them together separately.

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