Essay: Worlds Longest

: The longest essay ever attempted as a single sitting writing stunt is another matter. In 2021, a performance artist in Berlin typed for 120 hours straight, producing a 540,000-word stream-of-consciousness “essay” on loneliness. It was never published or verified.

The does not officially list “longest essay,” but in academic circles, the longest known undergraduate essay is one by a University of Bristol history student in 2012 who submitted a 112,000-word dissertation (roughly the length of a 350-page book). The tutor reportedly read it over a summer. worlds longest essay

If you want the : a French philosopher, Bernard-Henri Lévy , once wrote a 1,200-page essay on philosophy and war ( L’Esprit du judaïsme ), but again, publishers call it a book. : The longest essay ever attempted as a

For a single, continuous, non-fiction prose argument by one author, the record may go to by Richard Rhodes (c. 350,000 words) or The Gulag Archipelago by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (c. 500,000 words across three volumes). However, Solzhenitsyn called it a “literary investigation,” not an essay. The does not officially list “longest essay,” but

The phrase “world’s longest essay” is tricky because it depends on how you define essay . If you mean a single, continuous piece of argumentative or exploratory prose by one author (not a novel, not a compiled reference work), the title arguably belongs to (1859) by Charles Darwin—but even that runs about 150,000 words, far shorter than many doctoral dissertations.

: There is no universally accepted “longest essay” because once an essay exceeds ~50,000 words, publishers rebrand it as a book. The longest famous essay likely remains John Locke’s An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1689) — 360,000 words, spanning four books. Locke called it one essay, and by that definition, he probably holds the crown.