Novel

A Japanese noblewoman Murasaki Shikbu wrote in 1007 The Story of Genji. A 2,200-page tale of a prince looking for love and wisdom, it is considered to be the world's first novel.

The Story of Genji was written mostly in kana script. Kana script was originally developed for women, as writing with Chinese characters was considered a "masculine" pursuit.

The Power of Sympathy by William Hill Brown was published in Boston, Massachusetts on January 21, 1789 and sold at the price of nine shillings. The book is widely considered to be the first American novel.

Title page of the first edition

From the late 18th to mid-19th century, it was considered bad for women to read novels based on the belief that women were unable to differentiate between fiction and real life.

English playwright and novelist Edward Bulwer-Lytton popularized the opening line "It was a dark and stormy night". The first sentence of his 1830 novel, Paul Clifford, reads in full:
It was a dark and stormy night; the rain fell in torrents - except at occasional intervals, when it was checked by a violent gust of wind which swept up the streets (for it is in London that our scene lies), rattling along the housetops, and fiercely agitating the scanty flame of the lamps that struggled against the darkness.

Bulwer-Lytton is also credited with popularizing the term "the great unwashed" which he used in the same novel.

Abolitionist and lecturer William Wells Brown was the first African American to have his novel published in America. Brown wrote Clotel, also known as The President’s Daughter, which was published in Philadelphia in the summer of 1853.

In 1905, when penny dreadfuls ruled the literary landscape, Edgar Wallace penned The Four Just Men. A cunning plot twist, a juicy £500 prize for the killer's name - what could go wrong? Well, forgetting to specify "one winner only" could, as Wallace soon discovered. His book soared to fame, but so did his debt, as every astute reader who unmasked the culprit laid claim to the cash. A cautionary tale for authors, proving that even the best-laid literary plans can go spectacularly awry.

In Search of Lost Time (French: À la recherche du temps perdu) is a novel in seven volumes, written by Marcel Proust and published in France between 1913 and 1927. It holds the record for longest novel, at 1,200,000 words and 4,211 pages.

Ernest Vincent Wright wrote his 1939 novel Gadsby as a literary challenge to prove that it was possible to create a substantial work of fiction without using the most commonly used letter in the English alphabet. The book is approximately 50,000 words in length and does not contain any instances of the letter "e."

The working title of Joseph Heller's 1961 novel Catch-22 was Catch-18.

Bomber by Len Deighton was the first novel to be written on a word processor. He wrote it in the late 1960s on IBM’s MTST (Magnetic Tape Selectric Typewriter), sold in the European market as the MT72.

First Edition Wikipedia Commons

In 1969, French author Georges Perec wrote a 300-page novel called La Disparition which completely lacked the letter 'e'. It has since been translated into a dozen languages maintaining this limitation, including an English version entitled A Void.

Due to the limited technology of the 1980s, Tom Clancy's novel, The Hunt For Red October, had to be saved on ten floppy disks.

Taylor Swift wrote a 350-page novel when she was 12 years old.

A work of fiction between 20,000 and 49,999 words is often considered a novella, but it's important to note that these are just general guidelines, and there is no hard-and-fast rule. The distinction between a novella and a novel is not based on a strict word count, but rather on the complexity and depth of the story. A 50,000-word novel may be considered a novella if it lacks the substance and development of a full-length novel, while a novella that is packed with detail and complexity may be considered a novel in its own right. Ultimately, the definition of a novella versus a novel is subjective and varies from person to person.