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The Writers Who Wrote the Most in History
- codevark 4mo ago[dead]
- recursivedoubts 4mo agolol 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/ https://www.chesterton.org/store/product/volume-xxxvii/ i have the first four
- damontal 4mo agoExcept he referred to him as G.J. Chesterton.
- antonvs 4mo agoI hear he was good friends with H.F. Wells.
- bryanrasmussen 4mo agoI heard he used to annoy Chesterton by walking into the club and announcing loudly "Herbert Fucking Wells Is In Da House!"
- icepush 4mo agoI heard he would prank him by taking down his fence.
- bombcar 4mo agoWhen 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.
- recursivedoubts 4mo agolol, he must have plagarized himself so many times over the years
- bombcar 4mo agoMost (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 4mo agoAbsolutely. 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 4mo agoIf 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 4mo agoWhen 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.
- pglevy 4mo agoI 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.
- socalgal2 4mo agoInterestingly, 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_long_would_it_take_to_read_the_longest_fanfic/ https://www.reddit.com/r/FanFiction/comments/1ggcxle/how_lon...
- slyall 4mo agoLeft 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. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Hamilton_(writer) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Hamilton_(writer)
- Wildgoose 4mo agoCame here to say exactly this. He wrote under so many pseudonyms he appeared to be an entire team of writers on his own.
- __0x01 4mo agoThanks for this. I especially enjoyed the section on word counting software and word linking games.
- Ozzie_osman 4mo ago"writers who wrote the most in history" Proceeds to ignore Eastern writers (Arab, Chinese, Persian) who wrote just as much or more.
- otterley 4mo agoIgnored, or just unaware? Perhaps you could reach out to the author and point them to such writers.
- brennanbrown 4mo agoThere's an entire section on Chinese writers lol
- Metricon 4mo agoAnother 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.
- dobreandl 4mo agoNicolae Iorga is not on that list, has around 1100 published books and between 12k - 25k articles
- jll29 4mo agoAgatha 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.
- pdm55 4mo agoNot 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.
- 6LLvveMx2koXfwn 4mo agoMore importantly: > Welcome to brennan.day! I respect your decision to not use JavaScript. You can read here for more information about what functionality is disabled and why.
- chrisofspades 4mo agoSurprised that Isaac Asimov wasn't mentioned.
- casey2 4mo agoXianxia authors write a mind-boggling amount, probably because some are paid by the character. Surprised Bertrand Russel didn't make the cut.
- fellowniusmonk 4mo agoInteresting how much of this writing was dictated.