The Writers Who Wrote the Most in History
Comments
recursivedoubts
bombcar
When your job is to produce writings every week, you produce a ton of writings.
About 15 volumes in I started to realize I’d read most of what he had to say; but it was still entertaining each time.
Given his size, perhaps he was the Largest Language Model.
pglevy
I happened to dip into Heretics recently and thought, if someone were to publish one of these essays as a blog post today, it would be decried as AI slop. This must be who the models learned to write from.
recursivedoubts
lol, he must have plagarized himself so many times over the years
bombcar
Most (but by no means all) prolific authors do, eventually. You see it especially in podcasts, many of them start to somewhat repeat after a few tens or hundreds of episodes.
ghaff
Absolutely. When I was doing a more full-time analyst thing, I didn't reuse content wholesale but there was often very little point in rewriting an explanation of some basic concept with different words. (And, yes, as to volume, it really adds up if you're doing 1,000 words or so most weekdays.)
bombcar
If you listen to hours and hours of someone who does "speeches without notes" you start to realize how they do it - they have "building blocks" that they piece together in different orders.
ghaff
When I was doing more presentations than I do today, I didn't reuse presentations (unless it was part of some sort company roadshow). But, yes, I'd reuse bits and pieces--often tweaked--rather than each presentation being created from scratch.
socalgal2
Interestingly, several internet posters are in the same range as GK Chesterton and that includes HN's tptacek, Stack Overflow's Jon Skeet.
There's people who've written 2x to 4x more than Chesterson like James Dean, and did so in just 7 years.
https://www.reddit.com/r/FanFiction/comments/1ggcxle/how_lon...
damontal
Except he referred to him as G.J. Chesterton.
antonvs
I hear he was good friends with H.F. Wells.
bryanrasmussen
I heard he used to annoy Chesterton by walking into the club and announcing loudly "Herbert Fucking Wells Is In Da House!"
icepush
I heard he would prank him by taking down his fence.
pdm55
Not my "cup of tea", but certainly a record holder is Agatha Christie whose 66 detective novels and 15 short-story collections have sold over two billion copies, an amount surpassed only by the Bible and the works of William Shakespeare.
In years past, my preferred crime writer was Walter Mosley, who wrote the Easy Rawlins series among his output of 70 novels. A Jewish African-American, he was at one time a computer programmer. He turned to novel writing at 35 years of age.
ghaff
Another prolific English author (of mostly children's books) was Enid Blyton who wrote somewhere between 700 and 800 books.
aaron695
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6LLvveMx2koXfwn
More importantly:
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dobreandl
Nicolae Iorga is not on that list, has around 1100 published books and between 12k - 25k articles
chrisofspades
Surprised that Isaac Asimov wasn't mentioned.
jll29
Agatha Christie was also a high-volume writer; apparently, this was due to unreasonably demands in her contracts with her publisher, and she hated to be thus pushed.
__0x01
Thanks for this. I especially enjoyed the section on word counting software and word linking games.
slyall
Left out Charles Hamilton
It has been estimated by the researchers Lofts and Adley that Hamilton wrote around 100 million words or the equivalent of 1,200 average-length novels, making him the most prolific author in history. He is known to have created over 100 schools that were the subjects of his stories as well as writing many non-school stories. More than 5,000 of his stories have been identified, of which 3,100 were reprinted.
Wildgoose
Came here to say exactly this. He wrote under so many pseudonyms he appeared to be an entire team of writers on his own.
fellowniusmonk
Interesting how much of this writing was dictated.
casey2
Xianxia authors write a mind-boggling amount, probably because some are paid by the character. Surprised Bertrand Russel didn't make the cut.
Metricon
Another to add to this list would be Isaac Asimov. Most well known as a Science Fiction writer, he actual wrote over 500 books (mostly non-fiction) on a wide variety of subjects.
Ozzie_osman
"writers who wrote the most in history"
Proceeds to ignore Eastern writers (Arab, Chinese, Persian) who wrote just as much or more.
otterley
Ignored, or just unaware? Perhaps you could reach out to the author and point them to such writers.
brennanbrown
There's an entire section on Chinese writers lol
codevark
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lol i clicked on the article prepared to be angry that GK Chesterton wasn't mentioned and he was the first one mentioned. His collected works run to at least 37 volumes:
https://www.chesterton.org/store/product/volume-xxxvii/
i have the first four