Colman did Faulkner pull it off?” is a question many a fledgling writer has asked themselves while struggling through a period of apprenticeship like that novelist John Barth describes in his 1999 talk “My Faulkner.” Barth “reorchestrated” his literary heroes, he says, “in search of my writerly self… downloading my innumerable predecessors as only an insatiable green apprentice can.” Surely a great many writers can relate when Barth says, “it was Faulkner at his most involuted and incantatory who most enchanted me.” For many a writer, the Faulknerian sentence is an irresistible labyrinth. His syntax has a way of weaving itself into the unconscious, emerging as fair to middling imitation. While studying at Johns Hopkins University, Barth found himself writing about his native Eastern Shore Maryland in a pastiche style of “middle Faulkner and late Joyce.” He may have won some praise from a visiting young William Styron, “but the finished opus didn’t fly—for one thing, because Faulkner intimately knew his Snopses and Compsons and Sartorises, as I did not know my made-up denizens of the Maryland marsh.” The advice to write only what you know may not be worth much as a universal commandment. But studying the way that Faulkner wrote when he turned to the subjects he knew best provides an object lesson on how powerful a literary resource intimacy can be. Not only does Faulkner’s deep affiliation with his characters’ inner lives elevate his portraits far above the level of local color or regionalist curiosity, but it animates his sentences, makes them constantly move and breathe. No matter how long and twisted they get, they do not wilt, wither, or drag; they run river-like, turning around in asides, outraging themselves and doubling and tripling back. Faulkner’s intimacy is not earnestness, it is the uncanny feeling of a raw encounter with a nerve center lighting up with information, all of it seemingly critically important. It is the extraordinary sensory quality of his prose that enabled Faulkner to get away with writing the longest sentence in literature, at least according to the 1983 Guinness Book of World Records, a passage from Absalom, Absalom! consisting of ,288 words and who knows how many different kinds of clauses. There are now longer sentences in English writing. Jonathan Coe’s The Rotter’s Club ends with a -page long whopper with ,955 words in it. Entire novels hundreds of pages long have been written in one sentence in other languages. All of Faulkner’s modernist contemporaries, including of course Joyce, Wolff, and Beckett, mastered the use of run-ons, to different effect. But, for a time, Faulkner took the run-on as far as it could go. He may have had no intention of inspiring postmodern fiction, but one of its best-known novelists, Barth, only found his voice by first writing a “heavily Faulknerian marsh-opera.” Many hundreds of experimental writers have had almost identical experiences trying to exorcise the Oxford, Mississippi modernist’s voice from their prose. Read that onetime longest sentence in literature, all ,288 words of it, below. Just exactly like Father if Father had known as much about it the night before I went out there as he did the day after I came back thinking Mad impotent old man who realized at last that there must be some limit even to the capabilities of a demon for doing harm, who must have seen his situation as that of the show girl, the pony, who realizes that the principal tune she prances to comes not from horn and fiddle and drum but from a clock and calendar, must have seen himself as the old wornout cannon which realizes that it can deliver just one more fierce shot and crumble to dust in its own furious blast and recoil, who looked about upon the scene which was still within his scope and compass and saw son gone, vanished, more insuperable to him now than if the son were dead since now (if the son still lived) his name would be different and those to call him by it strangers and whatever dragon’s outcropping of Sutpen blood the son might sow on the body of whatever strange woman would therefore carry on the tradition, accomplish the hereditary evil and harm under another name and upon and among people who will never have heard the right one; daughter doomed to spinsterhood who had chosen spinsterhood already before there was anyone named Charles Bon since the aunt who came to succor her in bereavement and sorrow found neither but instead that calm absolutely impenetrable face between a homespun dress and sunbonnet seen before a closed door and again in a cloudy swirl of chickens while Jones was building the coffin and which she wore during the next year while the aunt lived there and the three women wove their own garments and raised their own food and cut the wood they cooked it with (excusing what help they had from Jones who lived with his granddaughter in the abandoned fishing camp with its collapsing roof and rotting porch against which the rusty scythe which Sutpen was to lend him, make him borrow to cut away the weeds from the door-and at last forced him to use though not to cut weeds, at least not vegetable weeds -would lean for two years) and wore still after the aunt’s indignation had swept her back to town to live on stolen garden truck and out o f anonymous baskets left on her front steps at night, the three of them, the two daughters negro and white and the aunt twelve miles away watching from her distance as the two daughters watched from theirs the old demon, the ancient varicose and despairing Faustus fling his final main now with the Creditor’s hand already on his shoulder, running his little country store now for his bread and meat, haggling tediously over nickels and dimes with rapacious and poverty-stricken whites and negroes, who at one time could have galloped for ten miles in any direction without crossing his own boundary, using out of his meagre stock the cheap ribbons and beads and the stale violently-colored candy with which even an old man can seduce a fifteen-year-old country girl, to ruin the granddaughter o f his partner, this Jones-this gangling malaria-ridden white man whom he had given permission fourteen years ago to squat in the abandoned fishing camp with the year-old grandchild-Jones, partner porter and clerk who at the demon’s command removed with his own hand (and maybe delivered too) from the showcase the candy beads and ribbons, measured the very cloth from which Judith (who had not been bereaved and did not mourn) helped the granddaughter to fashion a dress to walk past the lounging men in, the side-looking and the tongues, until her increasing belly taught her embarrassment-or perhaps fear;-Jones who before ’ had not even been allowed to approach the front of the house and who during the next four years got no nearer than the kitchen door and that only when he brought the game and fish and vegetables on which the seducer-to-be’s wife and daughter (and Clytie too, the one remaining servant, negro, the one who would forbid him to pass the kitchen door with what he brought) depended on to keep life in them, but who now entered the house itself on the (quite frequent now) afternoons when the demon would suddenly curse the store empty of customers and lock the door and repair to the rear and in the same tone in which he used to address his orderly or even his house servants when he had them (and in which he doubtless ordered Jones to fetch from the showcase the ribbons and beads and candy) direct Jones to fetch the jug, the two of them (and Jones even sitting now who in the old days, the old dead Sunday afternoons of monotonous peace which they spent beneath the scuppernong arbor in the back yard, the demon lying in the hammock while Jones squatted against a post, rising from time to time to pour for the demon from the demijohn and the bucket of spring water which he had fetched from the spring more than a mile away then squatting again, chortling and chuckling and saying `Sho, Mister Tawm’ each time the demon paused)-the two of them drinking turn and turn about from the jug and the demon not lying down now nor even sitting but reaching after the third or second drink that old man’s state of impotent and furious undefeat in which he would rise, swaying and plunging and shouting for his horse and pistols to ride single-handed into Washington and shoot Lincoln (a year or so too late here) and Sherman both, shouting, ‘Kill them! Shoot them down like the dogs they are!’ and Jones: ‘Sho, Kernel; sho now’ and catching him as he fell and commandeering the first passing wagon to take him to the house and carry him up the front steps and through the paintless formal door beneath its fanlight imported pane by pane from Europe which Judith held open for him to enter with no change, no alteration in that calm frozen face which she had worn for four years now, and on up the stairs and into the bedroom and put him to bed like a baby and then lie down himself on the floor beside the bed though not to sleep since before dawn the man on the bed would stir and groan and Jones would say, ‘flyer I am, Kernel. Hit’s all right. They aint whupped us yit, air they?’ this Jones who after the demon rode away with the regiment when the granddaughter was only eight years old would tell people that he ‘was lookin after Major’s place and niggers’ even before they had time to ask him why he was not with the troops and perhaps in time came to believe the lie himself, who was among the first to greet the demon when he returned, to meet him at the gate and say, ‘Well, Kernel, they kilt us but they aint whupped us yit, air they?’ who even worked, labored, sweat at the demon’s behest during that first furious period while the demon believed he could restore by sheer indomitable willing the Sutpen’s Hundred which he remembered and had lost, labored with no hope of pay or reward who must have seen long before the demon did (or would admit it) that the task was hopeless-blind Jones who apparently saw still in that furious lecherous wreck the old fine figure of the man who once galloped on the black thoroughbred about that domain two boundaries of which the eye could not see from any point. Related Content: Wonderfully Long Literary Sentences by Samuel Beckett, Virginia Woolf, F. Scott Fitzgerald & Other Masters of the Run-On Seven Tips From William Faulkner on How to Write Fiction William Faulkner Reads from As I Lay Dying Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness .k SHARES Facebook Twitter Reddit by Josh Jones | Permalink | Comments () | Support Open Culture We’re hoping to rely on our loyal readers rather than erratic ads. To support Open Culture’s continued operation, please consider making a donation. We thank you! Comments () You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed. Random1785 says: September , 2019 at : pm Imagine reading a novel with a sentence that was 000 words long! Reply ranouttanameideasandimspendingtoomuchtimethinkingofthem says: November , 2019 at : pm this is absurd. imagine reading this book and being like “jeez this sentence is so long” Reply mikeyliam426@icloud.com says: April , 2020 at : pm Ya know ya got ya ya girl ya ya know ya ya boy you got caught with them and then ya got a robot in the car with a car in your head that was the best dog ever and you can call me and call him when I wanna is it time I get off work I will see if I gotta I wanna is a time I got a ride truck truck ride and iiiuuyr Reply Happy says: April , 2020 at :08 pm How did you do that. the longest thing that I have ever wrote was a 600 word paragraph and I just wrote that. Reply helothereboi says: June , 2020 at : am I think this is so cool that he spent this time on it but who would really read this all Reply Caileb says: June , 2020 at :08 pm omg i have to read this about a week and im done and i just want to say this have made my day Reply arkin says: June , 2020 at :02 pm i have wrote a story which has 12083 words in it. i broke the world record. but they did not give the award because i was a kid :C Reply Judith says: August , 2020 at :05 pm Read this in an hour easily Reply ME says: September , 2020 at : am hi! Reply Jesse Dosch says: November , 2020 at : am I won yay Reply Jesse Dosch says: November , 2020 at : am @arkin “It is supposedly the world’s longest published novel in English at . million words. If you have some extra time, you can read it at marienbadmylove.com. . A la recherche du temps perdu by Marcel Proust.” Reply Jesse Dosch says: November , 2020 at : am @arkin “It is supposedly the world’s longest published novel in English at . million words. If you have some extra time, you can read it at marienbadmylove.com. . A la recherche du temps perdu by Marcel Proust.” Reply Jesse Dosch says: November , 2020 at : am I got a sentence that was 5639 words long Reply this guy says: November , 2020 at : am i just looked it up so can can copy and paste it on my school chat for fun not to read Reply Benjamin says: December , 2020 at : am I just wanted to say, i really like cheese, and…i think…i think my teacher is mad at me sry wait…shes mad because i was asking my other teacher questions about work online… hmmm….my teacher sure is a ##### ass feminist… Reply yurrr says: December , 2020 at : am shutcho pickel chin as up Reply austin says: January , 2021 at :05 pm i just wrote a sentence with ,289 words so ha Reply Leave a Reply NAME (REQUIRED) EMAIL (REQUIRED) MESSAGE Essentials ,500 Free Online Courses 1000+ MOOCs ,150 Free Movies 700 Free Audio Books 150+ Best Podcasts 800 Free eBooks 200 Free Textbooks 300 Free Language Lessons 150 Free Business Courses Free K- Education Get Our Daily Email Support Us We're hoping to rely on loyal readers, rather than erratic ads. 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All rights reserved. Home About Us Advertise with Us Copyright Policy Privacy Policy Terms of Use Bio Audio Books Online Courses MOOCs Movies Languages Textbooks eBooks Open Culture was founded by Dan Colman.How did Faulkner pull it off?” is a question many a fledgling writer has asked themselves while struggling through a period of apprenticeship like that novelist John Barth describes in his 1999 talk “My Faulkner.” Barth “reorchestrated” his literary heroes, he says, “in search of my writerly self… downloading my innumerable predecessors as only an insatiable green apprentice can.” Surely a great many writers can relate when Barth says, “it was Faulkner at his most involuted and incantatory who most enchanted me.” For many a writer, the Faulknerian sentence is an irresistible labyrinth. His syntax has a way of weaving itself into the unconscious, emerging as fair to middling imitation. While studying at Johns Hopkins University, Barth found himself writing about his native Eastern Shore Maryland in a pastiche style of “middle Faulkner and late Joyce.” He may have won some praise from a visiting young William Styron, “but the finished opus didn’t fly—for one thing, because Faulkner intimately knew his Snopses and Compsons and Sartorises, as I did not know my made-up denizens of the Maryland marsh.” The advice to write only what you know may not be worth much as a universal commandment. But studying the way that Faulkner wrote when he turned to the subjects he knew best provides an object lesson on how powerful a literary resource intimacy can be. Not only does Faulkner’s deep affiliation with his characters’ inner lives elevate his portraits far above the level of local color or regionalist curiosity, but it animates his sentences, makes them constantly move and breathe. No matter how long and twisted they get, they do not wilt, wither, or drag; they run river-like, turning around in asides, outraging themselves and doubling and tripling back. Faulkner’s intimacy is not earnestness, it is the uncanny feeling of a raw encounter with a nerve center lighting up with information, all of it seemingly critically important. It is the extraordinary sensory quality of his prose that enabled Faulkner to get away with writing the longest sentence in literature, at least according to the 1983 Guinness Book of World Records, a passage from Absalom, Absalom! consisting of ,288 words and who knows how many different kinds of clauses. There are now longer sentences in English writing. Jonathan Coe’s The Rotter’s Club ends with a -page long whopper with ,955 words in it. Entire novels hundreds of pages long have been written in one sentence in other languages. All of Faulkner’s modernist contemporaries, including of course Joyce, Wolff, and Beckett, mastered the use of run-ons, to different effect. But, for a time, Faulkner took the run-on as far as it could go. He may have had no intention of inspiring postmodern fiction, but one of its best-known novelists, Barth, only found his voice by first writing a “heavily Faulknerian marsh-opera.” Many hundreds of experimental writers have had almost identical experiences trying to exorcise the Oxford, Mississippi modernist’s voice from their prose. Read that onetime longest sentence in literature, all ,288 words of it, below. Just exactly like Father if Father had known as much about it the night before I went out there as he did the day after I came back thinking Mad impotent old man who realized at last that there must be some limit even to the capabilities of a demon for doing harm, who must have seen his situation as that of the show girl, the pony, who realizes that the principal tune she prances to comes not from horn and fiddle and drum but from a clock and calendar, must have seen himself as the old wornout cannon which realizes that it can deliver just one more fierce shot and crumble to dust in its own furious blast and recoil, who looked about upon the scene which was still within his scope and compass and saw son gone, vanished, more insuperable to him now than if the son were dead since now (if the son still lived) his name would be different and those to call him by it strangers and whatever dragon’s outcropping of Sutpen blood the son might sow on the body of whatever strange woman would therefore carry on the tradition, accomplish the hereditary evil and harm under another name and upon and among people who will never have heard the right one; daughter doomed to spinsterhood who had chosen spinsterhood already before there was anyone named Charles Bon since the aunt who came to succor her in bereavement and sorrow found neither but instead that calm absolutely impenetrable face between a homespun dress and sunbonnet seen before a closed door and again in a cloudy swirl of chickens while Jones was building the coffin and which she wore during the next year while the aunt lived there and the three women wove their own garments and raised their own food and cut the wood they cooked it with (excusing what help they had from Jones who lived with his granddaughter in the abandoned fishing camp with its collapsing roof and rotting porch against which the rusty scythe which Sutpen was to lend him, make him borrow to cut away the weeds from the door-and at last forced him to use though not to cut weeds, at least not vegetable weeds -would lean for two years) and wore still after the aunt’s indignation had swept her back to town to live on stolen garden truck and out o f anonymous baskets left on her front steps at night, the three of them, the two daughters negro and white and the aunt twelve miles away watching from her distance as the two daughters watched from theirs the old demon, the ancient varicose and despairing Faustus fling his final main now with the Creditor’s hand already on his shoulder, running his little country store now for his bread and meat, haggling tediously over nickels and dimes with rapacious and poverty-stricken whites and negroes, who at one time could have galloped for ten miles in any direction without crossing his own boundary, using out of his meagre stock the cheap ribbons and beads and the stale violently-colored candy with which even an old man can seduce a fifteen-year-old country girl, to ruin the granddaughter o f his partner, this Jones-this gangling malaria-ridden white man whom he had given permission fourteen years ago to squat in the abandoned fishing camp with the year-old grandchild-Jones, partner porter and clerk who at the demon’s command removed with his own hand (and maybe delivered too) from the showcase the candy beads and ribbons, measured the very cloth from which Judith (who had not been bereaved and did not mourn) helped the granddaughter to fashion a dress to walk past the lounging men in, the side-looking and the tongues, until her increasing belly taught her embarrassment-or perhaps fear;-Jones who before ’ had not even been allowed to approach the front of the house and who during the next four years got no nearer than the kitchen door and that only when he brought the game and fish and vegetables on which the seducer-to-be’s wife and daughter (and Clytie too, the one remaining servant, negro, the one who would forbid him to pass the kitchen door with what he brought) depended on to keep life in them, but who now entered the house itself on the (quite frequent now) afternoons when the demon would suddenly curse the store empty of customers and lock the door and repair to the rear and in the same tone in which he used to address his orderly or even his house servants when he had them (and in which he doubtless ordered Jones to fetch from the showcase the ribbons and beads and candy) direct Jones to fetch the jug, the two of them (and Jones even sitting now who in the old days, the old dead Sunday afternoons of monotonous peace which they spent beneath the scuppernong arbor in the back yard, the demon lying in the hammock while Jones squatted against a post, rising from time to time to pour for the demon from the demijohn and the bucket of spring water which he had fetched from the spring more than a mile away then squatting again, chortling and chuckling and saying `Sho, Mister Tawm’ each time the demon paused)-the two of them drinking turn and turn about from the jug and the demon not lying down now nor even sitting but reaching after the third or second drink that old man’s state of impotent and furious undefeat in which he would rise, swaying and plunging and shouting for his horse and pistols to ride single-handed into Washington and shoot Lincoln (a year or so too late here) and Sherman both, shouting, ‘Kill them! Shoot them down like the dogs they are!’ and Jones: ‘Sho, Kernel; sho now’ and catching him as he fell and commandeering the first passing wagon to take him to the house and carry him up the front steps and through the paintless formal door beneath its fanlight imported pane by pane from Europe which Judith held open for him to enter with no change, no alteration in that calm frozen face which she had worn for four years now, and on up the stairs and into the bedroom and put him to bed like a baby and then lie down himself on the floor beside the bed though not to sleep since before dawn the man on the bed would stir and groan and Jones would say, ‘flyer I am, Kernel. Hit’s all right. They aint whupped us yit, air they?’ this Jones who after the demon rode away with the regiment when the granddaughter was only eight years old would tell people that he ‘was lookin after Major’s place and niggers’ even before they had time to ask him why he was not with the troops and perhaps in time came to believe the lie himself, who was among the first to greet the demon when he returned, to meet him at the gate and say, ‘Well, Kernel, they kilt us but they aint whupped us yit, air they?’ who even worked, labored, sweat at the demon’s behest during that first furious period while the demon believed he could restore by sheer indomitable willing the Sutpen’s Hundred which he remembered and had lost, labored with no hope of pay or reward who must have seen long before the demon did (or would admit it) that the task was hopeless-blind Jones who apparently saw still in that furious lecherous wreck the old fine figure of the man who once galloped on the black thoroughbred about that domain two boundaries of which the eye could not see from any point. Related Content: Wonderfully Long Literary Sentences by Samuel Beckett, Virginia Woolf, F. Scott Fitzgerald & Other Masters of the Run-On Seven Tips From William Faulkner on How to Write Fiction William Faulkner Reads from As I Lay Dying Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness .k SHARES Facebook Twitter Reddit by Josh Jones | Permalink | Comments () | Support Open Culture We’re hoping to rely on our loyal readers rather than erratic ads. To support Open Culture’s continued operation, please consider making a donation. We thank you! Comments () You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed. Random1785 says: September , 2019 at : pm Imagine reading a novel with a sentence that was 000 words long! Reply ranouttanameideasandimspendingtoomuchtimethinkingofthem says: November , 2019 at : pm this is absurd. imagine reading this book and being like “jeez this sentence is so long” Reply mikeyliam426@icloud.com says: April , 2020 at : pm Ya know ya got ya ya girl ya ya know ya ya boy you got caught with them and then ya got a robot in the car with a car in your head that was the best dog ever and you can call me and call him when I wanna is it time I get off work I will see if I gotta I wanna is a time I got a ride truck truck ride and iiiuuyr Reply Happy says: April , 2020 at :08 pm How did you do that. the longest thing that I have ever wrote was a 600 word paragraph and I just wrote that. Reply helothereboi says: June , 2020 at : am I think this is so cool that he spent this time on it but who would really read this all Reply Caileb says: June , 2020 at :08 pm omg i have to read this about a week and im done and i just want to say this have made my day Reply arkin says: June , 2020 at :02 pm i have wrote a story which has 12083 words in it. i broke the world record. but they did not give the award because i was a kid :C Reply Judith says: August , 2020 at :05 pm Read this in an hour easily Reply ME says: September , 2020 at : am hi! Reply Jesse Dosch says: November , 2020 at : am I won yay Reply Jesse Dosch says: November , 2020 at : am @arkin “It is supposedly the world’s longest published novel in English at . million words. If you have some extra time, you can read it at marienbadmylove.com. . A la recherche du temps perdu by Marcel Proust.” Reply Jesse Dosch says: November , 2020 at : am @arkin “It is supposedly the world’s longest published novel in English at . million words. If you have some extra time, you can read it at marienbadmylove.com. . A la recherche du temps perdu by Marcel Proust.” Reply Jesse Dosch says: November , 2020 at : am I got a sentence that was 5639 words long Reply this guy says: November , 2020 at : am i just looked it up so can can copy and paste it on my school chat for fun not to read Reply Benjamin says: December , 2020 at : am I just wanted to say, i really like cheese, and…i think…i think my teacher is mad at me sry wait…shes mad because i was asking my other teacher questions about work online… hmmm….my teacher sure is a ##### ass feminist… Reply yurrr says: December , 2020 at : am shutcho pickel chin as up Reply austin says: January , 2021 at :05 pm i just wrote a sentence with ,289 words so ha Reply Leave a Reply NAME (REQUIRED) EMAIL (REQUIRED) MESSAGE Essentials ,500 Free Online Courses 1000+ MOOCs ,150 Free Movies 700 Free Audio Books 150+ Best Podcasts 800 Free eBooks 200 Free Textbooks 300 Free Language Lessons 150 Free Business Courses Free K- Education Get Our Daily Email Support Us We're hoping to rely on loyal readers, rather than erratic ads. 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All rights reserved. Home About Us Advertise with Us Copyright Policy Privacy Policy Terms of Use Bio Audio Books Online Courses MOOCs Movies Languages Textbooks eBooks Open Culture was founded by Dan How did Faulkner pull it off?” is a question many a fledgling writer has asked themselves while struggling through a period of apprenticeship like that novelist John Barth describes in his 1999 talk “My Faulkner.” Barth “reorchestrated” his literary heroes, he says, “in search of my writerly self… downloading my innumerable predecessors as only an insatiable green apprentice can.” Surely a great many writers can relate when Barth says, “it was Faulkner at his most involuted and incantatory who most enchanted me.” For many a writer, the Faulknerian sentence is an irresistible labyrinth. His syntax has a way of weaving itself into the unconscious, emerging as fair to middling imitation. While studying at Johns Hopkins University, Barth found himself writing about his native Eastern Shore Maryland in a pastiche style of “middle Faulkner and late Joyce.” He may have won some praise from a visiting young William Styron, “but the finished opus didn’t fly—for one thing, because Faulkner intimately knew his Snopses and Compsons and Sartorises, as I did not know my made-up denizens of the Maryland marsh.” The advice to write only what you know may not be worth much as a universal commandment. But studying the way that Faulkner wrote when he turned to the subjects he knew best provides an object lesson on how powerful a literary resource intimacy can be. Not only does Faulkner’s deep affiliation with his characters’ inner lives elevate his portraits far above the level of local color or regionalist curiosity, but it animates his sentences, makes them constantly move and breathe. No matter how long and twisted they get, they do not wilt, wither, or drag; they run river-like, turning around in asides, outraging themselves and doubling and tripling back. Faulkner’s intimacy is not earnestness, it is the uncanny feeling of a raw encounter with a nerve center lighting up with information, all of it seemingly critically important. It is the extraordinary sensory quality of his prose that enabled Faulkner to get away with writing the longest sentence in literature, at least according to the 1983 Guinness Book of World Records, a passage from Absalom, Absalom! consisting of ,288 words and who knows how many different kinds of clauses. There are now longer sentences in English writing. Jonathan Coe’s The Rotter’s Club ends with a -page long whopper with ,955 words in it. Entire novels hundreds of pages long have been written in one sentence in other languages. All of Faulkner’s modernist contemporaries, including of course Joyce, Wolff, and Beckett, mastered the use of run-ons, to different effect. But, for a time, Faulkner took the run-on as far as it could go. He may have had no intention of inspiring postmodern fiction, but one of its best-known novelists, Barth, only found his voice by first writing a “heavily Faulknerian marsh-opera.” Many hundreds of experimental writers have had almost identical experiences trying to exorcise the Oxford, Mississippi modernist’s voice from their prose. Read that onetime longest sentence in literature, all ,288 words of it, below. Just exactly like Father if Father had known as much about it the night before I went out there as he did the day after I came back thinking Mad impotent old man who realized at last that there must be some limit even to the capabilities of a demon for doing harm, who must have seen his situation as that of the show girl, the pony, who realizes that the principal tune she prances to comes not from horn and fiddle and drum but from a clock and calendar, must have seen himself as the old wornout cannon which realizes that it can deliver just one more fierce shot and crumble to dust in its own furious blast and recoil, who looked about upon the scene which was still within his scope and compass and saw son gone, vanished, more insuperable to him now than if the son were dead since now (if the son still lived) his name would be different and those to call him by it strangers and whatever dragon’s outcropping of Sutpen blood the son might sow on the body of whatever strange woman would therefore carry on the tradition, accomplish the hereditary evil and harm under another name and upon and among people who will never have heard the right one; daughter doomed to spinsterhood who had chosen spinsterhood already before there was anyone named Charles Bon since the aunt who came to succor her in bereavement and sorrow found neither but instead that calm absolutely impenetrable face between a homespun dress and sunbonnet seen before a closed door and again in a cloudy swirl of chickens while Jones was building the coffin and which she wore during the next year while the aunt lived there and the three women wove their own garments and raised their own food and cut the wood they cooked it with (excusing what help they had from Jones who lived with his granddaughter in the abandoned fishing camp with its collapsing roof and rotting porch against which the rusty scythe which Sutpen was to lend him, make him borrow to cut away the weeds from the door-and at last forced him to use though not to cut weeds, at least not vegetable weeds -would lean for two years) and wore still after the aunt’s indignation had swept her back to town to live on stolen garden truck and out o f anonymous baskets left on her front steps at night, the three of them, the two daughters negro and white and the aunt twelve miles away watching from her distance as the two daughters watched from theirs the old demon, the ancient varicose and despairing Faustus fling his final main now with the Creditor’s hand already on his shoulder, running his little country store now for his bread and meat, haggling tediously over nickels and dimes with rapacious and poverty-stricken whites and negroes, who at one time could have galloped for ten miles in any direction without crossing his own boundary, using out of his meagre stock the cheap ribbons and beads and the stale violently-colored candy with which even an old man can seduce a fifteen-year-old country girl, to ruin the granddaughter o f his partner, this Jones-this gangling malaria-ridden white man whom he had given permission fourteen years ago to squat in the abandoned fishing camp with the year-old grandchild-Jones, partner porter and clerk who at the demon’s command removed with his own hand (and maybe delivered too) from the showcase the candy beads and ribbons, measured the very cloth from which Judith (who had not been bereaved and did not mourn) helped the granddaughter to fashion a dress to walk past the lounging men in, the side-looking and the tongues, until her increasing belly taught her embarrassment-or perhaps fear;-Jones who before ’ had not even been allowed to approach the front of the house and who during the next four years got no nearer than the kitchen door and that only when he brought the game and fish and vegetables on which the seducer-to-be’s wife and daughter (and Clytie too, the one remaining servant, negro, the one who would forbid him to pass the kitchen door with what he brought) depended on to keep life in them, but who now entered the house itself on the (quite frequent now) afternoons when the demon would suddenly curse the store empty of customers and lock the door and repair to the rear and in the same tone in which he used to address his orderly or even his house servants when he had them (and in which he doubtless ordered Jones to fetch from the showcase the ribbons and beads and candy) direct Jones to fetch the jug, the two of them (and Jones even sitting now who in the old days, the old dead Sunday afternoons of monotonous peace which they spent beneath the scuppernong arbor in the back yard, the demon lying in the hammock while Jones squatted against a post, rising from time to time to pour for the demon from the demijohn and the bucket of spring water which he had fetched from the spring more than a mile away then squatting again, chortling and chuckling and saying `Sho, Mister Tawm’ each time the demon paused)-the two of them drinking turn and turn about from the jug and the demon not lying down now nor even sitting but reaching after the third or second drink that old man’s state of impotent and furious undefeat in which he would rise, swaying and plunging and shouting for his horse and pistols to ride single-handed into Washington and shoot Lincoln (a year or so too late here) and Sherman both, shouting, ‘Kill them! Shoot them down like the dogs they are!’ and Jones: ‘Sho, Kernel; sho now’ and catching him as he fell and commandeering the first passing wagon to take him to the house and carry him up the front steps and through the paintless formal door beneath its fanlight imported pane by pane from Europe which Judith held open for him to enter with no change, no alteration in that calm frozen face which she had worn for four years now, and on up the stairs and into the bedroom and put him to bed like a baby and then lie down himself on the floor beside the bed though not to sleep since before dawn the man on the bed would stir and groan and Jones would say, ‘flyer I am, Kernel. Hit’s all right. They aint whupped us yit, air they?’ this Jones who after the demon rode away with the regiment when the granddaughter was only eight years old would tell people that he ‘was lookin after Major’s place and niggers’ even before they had time to ask him why he was not with the troops and perhaps in time came to believe the lie himself, who was among the first to greet the demon when he returned, to meet him at the gate and say, ‘Well, Kernel, they kilt us but they aint whupped us yit, air they?’ who even worked, labored, sweat at the demon’s behest during that first furious period while the demon believed he could restore by sheer indomitable willing the Sutpen’s Hundred which he remembered and had lost, labored with no hope of pay or reward who must have seen long before the demon did (or would admit it) that the task was hopeless-blind Jones who apparently saw still in that furious lecherous wreck the old fine figure of the man who once galloped on the black thoroughbred about that domain two boundaries of which the eye could not see from any point. Related Content: Wonderfully Long Literary Sentences by Samuel Beckett, Virginia Woolf, F. Scott Fitzgerald & Other Masters of the Run-On Seven Tips From William Faulkner on How to Write Fiction William Faulkner Reads from As I Lay Dying Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness .k SHARES Facebook Twitter Reddit by Josh Jones | Permalink | Comments () | Support Open Culture We’re hoping to rely on our loyal readers rather than erratic ads. To support Open Culture’s continued operation, please consider making a donation. We thank you! Comments () You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed. Random1785 says: September , 2019 at : pm Imagine reading a novel with a sentence that was 000 words long! Reply ranouttanameideasandimspendingtoomuchtimethinkingofthem says: November , 2019 at : pm this is absurd. imagine reading this book and being like “jeez this sentence is so long” Reply mikeyliam426@icloud.com says: April , 2020 at : pm Ya know ya got ya ya girl ya ya know ya ya boy you got caught with them and then ya got a robot in the car with a car in your head that was the best dog ever and you can call me and call him when I wanna is it time I get off work I will see if I gotta I wanna is a time I got a ride truck truck ride and iiiuuyr Reply Happy says: April , 2020 at :08 pm How did you do that. the longest thing that I have ever wrote was a 600 word paragraph and I just wrote that. Reply helothereboi says: June , 2020 at : am I think this is so cool that he spent this time on it but who would really read this all Reply Caileb says: June , 2020 at :08 pm omg i have to read this about a week and im done and i just want to say this have made my day Reply arkin says: June , 2020 at :02 pm i have wrote a story which has 12083 words in it. i broke the world record. but they did not give the award because i was a kid :C Reply Judith says: August , 2020 at :05 pm Read this in an hour easily Reply ME says: September , 2020 at : am hi! Reply Jesse Dosch says: November , 2020 at : am I won yay Reply Jesse Dosch says: November , 2020 at : am @arkin “It is supposedly the world’s longest published novel in English at . million words. If you have some extra time, you can read it at marienbadmylove.com. . A la recherche du temps perdu by Marcel Proust.” Reply Jesse Dosch says: November , 2020 at : am @arkin “It is supposedly the world’s longest published novel in English at . million words. If you have some extra time, you can read it at marienbadmylove.com. . A la recherche du temps perdu by Marcel Proust.” Reply Jesse Dosch says: November , 2020 at : am I got a sentence that was 5639 words long Reply this guy says: November , 2020 at : am i just looked it up so can can copy and paste it on my school chat for fun not to read Reply Benjamin says: December , 2020 at : am I just wanted to say, i really like cheese, and…i think…i think my teacher is mad at me sry wait…shes mad because i was asking my other teacher questions about work online… hmmm….my teacher sure is a ##### ass feminist… Reply yurrr says: December , 2020 at : am shutcho pickel chin as up Reply austin says: January , 2021 at :05 pm i just wrote a sentence with ,289 words so ha Reply Leave a Reply NAME (REQUIRED) EMAIL (REQUIRED) MESSAGE Essentials ,500 Free Online Courses 1000+ MOOCs ,150 Free Movies 700 Free Audio Books 150+ Best Podcasts 800 Free eBooks 200 Free Textbooks 300 Free Language Lessons 150 Free Business Courses Free K- Education Get Our Daily Email Support Us We're hoping to rely on loyal readers, rather than erratic ads. 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All rights reserved. Home About Us Advertise with Us Copyright Policy Privacy Policy Terms of Use Bio Audio Books Online Courses MOOCs Movies Languages Textbooks eBooks Open Culture was founded by Dan How did Faulkner pull it off?” is a question many a fledgling writer has asked themselves while struggling through a period of apprenticeship like that novelist John Barth describes in his 1999 talk “My Faulkner.” Barth “reorchestrated” his literary heroes, he says, “in search of my writerly self… downloading my innumerable predecessors as only an insatiable green apprentice can.” Surely a great many writers can relate when Barth says, “it was Faulkner at his most involuted and incantatory who most enchanted me.” For many a writer, the Faulknerian sentence is an irresistible labyrinth. His syntax has a way of weaving itself into the unconscious, emerging as fair to middling imitation. While studying at Johns Hopkins University, Barth found himself writing about his native Eastern Shore Maryland in a pastiche style of “middle Faulkner and late Joyce.” He may have won some praise from a visiting young William Styron, “but the finished opus didn’t fly—for one thing, because Faulkner intimately knew his Snopses and Compsons and Sartorises, as I did not know my made-up denizens of the Maryland marsh.” The advice to write only what you know may not be worth much as a universal commandment. But studying the way that Faulkner wrote when he turned to the subjects he knew best provides an object lesson on how powerful a literary resource intimacy can be. Not only does Faulkner’s deep affiliation with his characters’ inner lives elevate his portraits far above the level of local color or regionalist curiosity, but it animates his sentences, makes them constantly move and breathe. No matter how long and twisted they get, they do not wilt, wither, or drag; they run river-like, turning around in asides, outraging themselves and doubling and tripling back. Faulkner’s intimacy is not earnestness, it is the uncanny feeling of a raw encounter with a nerve center lighting up with information, all of it seemingly critically important. It is the extraordinary sensory quality of his prose that enabled Faulkner to get away with writing the longest sentence in literature, at least according to the 1983 Guinness Book of World Records, a passage from Absalom, Absalom! consisting of ,288 words and who knows how many different kinds of clauses. There are now longer sentences in English writing. Jonathan Coe’s The Rotter’s Club ends with a -page long whopper with ,955 words in it. Entire novels hundreds of pages long have been written in one sentence in other languages. All of Faulkner’s modernist contemporaries, including of course Joyce, Wolff, and Beckett, mastered the use of run-ons, to different effect. But, for a time, Faulkner took the run-on as far as it could go. He may have had no intention of inspiring postmodern fiction, but one of its best-known novelists, Barth, only found his voice by first writing a “heavily Faulknerian marsh-opera.” Many hundreds of experimental writers have had almost identical experiences trying to exorcise the Oxford, Mississippi modernist’s voice from their prose. Read that onetime longest sentence in literature, all ,288 words of it, below. Just exactly like Father if Father had known as much about it the night before I went out there as he did the day after I came back thinking Mad impotent old man who realized at last that there must be some limit even to the capabilities of a demon for doing harm, who must have seen his situation as that of the show girl, the pony, who realizes that the principal tune she prances to comes not from horn and fiddle and drum but from a clock and calendar, must have seen himself as the old wornout cannon which realizes that it can deliver just one more fierce shot and crumble to dust in its own furious blast and recoil, who looked about upon the scene which was still within his scope and compass and saw son gone, vanished, more insuperable to him now than if the son were dead since now (if the son still lived) his name would be different and those to call him by it strangers and whatever dragon’s outcropping of Sutpen blood the son might sow on the body of whatever strange woman would therefore carry on the tradition, accomplish the hereditary evil and harm under another name and upon and among people who will never have heard the right one; daughter doomed to spinsterhood who had chosen spinsterhood already before there was anyone named Charles Bon since the aunt who came to succor her in bereavement and sorrow found neither but instead that calm absolutely impenetrable face between a homespun dress and sunbonnet seen before a closed door and again in a cloudy swirl of chickens while Jones was building the coffin and which she wore during the next year while the aunt lived there and the three women wove their own garments and raised their own food and cut the wood they cooked it with (excusing what help they had from Jones who lived with his granddaughter in the abandoned fishing camp with its collapsing roof and rotting porch against which the rusty scythe which Sutpen was to lend him, make him borrow to cut away the weeds from the door-and at last forced him to use though not to cut weeds, at least not vegetable weeds -would lean for two years) and wore still after the aunt’s indignation had swept her back to town to live on stolen garden truck and out o f anonymous baskets left on her front steps at night, the three of them, the two daughters negro and white and the aunt twelve miles away watching from her distance as the two daughters watched from theirs the old demon, the ancient varicose and despairing Faustus fling his final main now with the Creditor’s hand already on his shoulder, running his little country store now for his bread and meat, haggling tediously over nickels and dimes with rapacious and poverty-stricken whites and negroes, who at one time could have galloped for ten miles in any direction without crossing his own boundary, using out of his meagre stock the cheap ribbons and beads and the stale violently-colored candy with which even an old man can seduce a fifteen-year-old country girl, to ruin the granddaughter o f his partner, this Jones-this gangling malaria-ridden white man whom he had given permission fourteen years ago to squat in the abandoned fishing camp with the year-old grandchild-Jones, partner porter and clerk who at the demon’s command removed with his own hand (and maybe delivered too) from the showcase the candy beads and ribbons, measured the very cloth from which Judith (who had not been bereaved and did not mourn) helped the granddaughter to fashion a dress to walk past the lounging men in, the side-looking and the tongues, until her increasing belly taught her embarrassment-or perhaps fear;-Jones who before ’ had not even been allowed to approach the front of the house and who during the next four years got no nearer than the kitchen door and that only when he brought the game and fish and vegetables on which the seducer-to-be’s wife and daughter (and Clytie too, the one remaining servant, negro, the one who would forbid him to pass the kitchen door with what he brought) depended on to keep life in them, but who now entered the house itself on the (quite frequent now) afternoons when the demon would suddenly curse the store empty of customers and lock the door and repair to the rear and in the same tone in which he used to address his orderly or even his house servants when he had them (and in which he doubtless ordered Jones to fetch from the showcase the ribbons and beads and candy) direct Jones to fetch the jug, the two of them (and Jones even sitting now who in the old days, the old dead Sunday afternoons of monotonous peace which they spent beneath the scuppernong arbor in the back yard, the demon lying in the hammock while Jones squatted against a post, rising from time to time to pour for the demon from the demijohn and the bucket of spring water which he had fetched from the spring more than a mile away then squatting again, chortling and chuckling and saying `Sho, Mister Tawm’ each time the demon paused)-the two of them drinking turn and turn about from the jug and the demon not lying down now nor even sitting but reaching after the third or second drink that old man’s state of impotent and furious undefeat in which he would rise, swaying and plunging and shouting for his horse and pistols to ride single-handed into Washington and shoot Lincoln (a year or so too late here) and Sherman both, shouting, ‘Kill them! Shoot them down like the dogs they are!’ and Jones: ‘Sho, Kernel; sho now’ and catching him as he fell and commandeering the first passing wagon to take him to the house and carry him up the front steps and through the paintless formal door beneath its fanlight imported pane by pane from Europe which Judith held open for him to enter with no change, no alteration in that calm frozen face which she had worn for four years now, and on up the stairs and into the bedroom and put him to bed like a baby and then lie down himself on the floor beside the bed though not to sleep since before dawn the man on the bed would stir and groan and Jones would say, ‘flyer I am, Kernel. Hit’s all right. They aint whupped us yit, air they?’ this Jones who after the demon rode away with the regiment when the granddaughter was only eight years old would tell people that he ‘was lookin after Major’s place and niggers’ even before they had time to ask him why he was not with the troops and perhaps in time came to believe the lie himself, who was among the first to greet the demon when he returned, to meet him at the gate and say, ‘Well, Kernel, they kilt us but they aint whupped us yit, air they?’ who even worked, labored, sweat at the demon’s behest during that first furious period while the demon believed he could restore by sheer indomitable willing the Sutpen’s Hundred which he remembered and had lost, labored with no hope of pay or reward who must have seen long before the demon did (or would admit it) that the task was hopeless-blind Jones who apparently saw still in that furious lecherous wreck the old fine figure of the man who once galloped on the black thoroughbred about that domain two boundaries of which the eye could not see from any point. Related Content: Wonderfully Long Literary Sentences by Samuel Beckett, Virginia Woolf, F. Scott Fitzgerald & Other Masters of the Run-On Seven Tips From William Faulkner on How to Write Fiction William Faulkner Reads from As I Lay Dying Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness .k SHARES Facebook Twitter Reddit by Josh Jones | Permalink | Comments () | Support Open Culture We’re hoping to rely on our loyal readers rather than erratic ads. To support Open Culture’s continued operation, please consider making a donation. We thank you! Comments () You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed. Random1785 says: September , 2019 at : pm Imagine reading a novel with a sentence that was 000 words long! Reply ranouttanameideasandimspendingtoomuchtimethinkingofthem says: November , 2019 at : pm this is absurd. imagine reading this book and being like “jeez this sentence is so long” Reply mikeyliam426@icloud.com says: April , 2020 at : pm Ya know ya got ya ya girl ya ya know ya ya boy you got caught with them and then ya got a robot in the car with a car in your head that was the best dog ever and you can call me and call him when I wanna is it time I get off work I will see if I gotta I wanna is a time I got a ride truck truck ride and iiiuuyr Reply Happy says: April , 2020 at :08 pm How did you do that. the longest thing that I have ever wrote was a 600 word paragraph and I just wrote that. Reply helothereboi says: June , 2020 at : am I think this is so cool that he spent this time on it but who would really read this all Reply Caileb says: June , 2020 at :08 pm omg i have to read this about a week and im done and i just want to say this have made my day Reply arkin says: June , 2020 at :02 pm i have wrote a story which has 12083 words in it. i broke the world record. but they did not give the award because i was a kid :C Reply Judith says: August , 2020 at :05 pm Read this in an hour easily Reply ME says: September , 2020 at : am hi! Reply Jesse Dosch says: November , 2020 at : am I won yay Reply Jesse Dosch says: November , 2020 at : am @arkin “It is supposedly the world’s longest published novel in English at . million words. If you have some extra time, you can read it at marienbadmylove.com. . A la recherche du temps perdu by Marcel Proust.” Reply Jesse Dosch says: November , 2020 at : am @arkin “It is supposedly the world’s longest published novel in English at . million words. If you have some extra time, you can read it at marienbadmylove.com. . A la recherche du temps perdu by Marcel Proust.” Reply Jesse Dosch says: November , 2020 at : am I got a sentence that was 5639 words long Reply this guy says: November , 2020 at : am i just looked it up so can can copy and paste it on my school chat for fun not to read Reply Benjamin says: December , 2020 at : am I just wanted to say, i really like cheese, and…i think…i think my teacher is mad at me sry wait…shes mad because i was asking my other teacher questions about work online… hmmm….my teacher sure is a ##### ass feminist… Reply yurrr says: December , 2020 at : am shutcho pickel chin as up Reply austin says: January , 2021 at :05 pm i just wrote a sentence with ,289 words so ha Reply Leave a Reply NAME (REQUIRED) EMAIL (REQUIRED) MESSAGE Essentials ,500 Free Online Courses 1000+ MOOCs ,150 Free Movies 700 Free Audio Books 150+ Best Podcasts 800 Free eBooks 200 Free Textbooks 300 Free Language Lessons 150 Free Business Courses Free K- Education Get Our Daily Email Support Us We're hoping to rely on loyal readers, rather than erratic ads. 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Dick Stories Neil Gaiman Stories David Foster Wallace Stories & Essays Hemingway Stories Great Gatsby & Other Fitzgerald Novels HP Lovecraft Edgar Allan Poe Free Alice Munro Stories Jennifer Egan Stories George Saunders Stories Hunter S. 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All rights reserved. Home About Us Advertise with Us Copyright Policy Privacy Policy Terms of Use Bio Audio Books Online Courses MOOCs Movies Languages Textbooks eBooks Open Culture was founded by Dan How did Faulkner pull it off?” is a question many a fledgling writer has asked themselves while struggling through a period of apprenticeship like that novelist John Barth describes in his 1999 talk “My Faulkner.” Barth “reorchestrated” his literary heroes, he says, “in search of my writerly self… downloading my innumerable predecessors as only an insatiable green apprentice can.” Surely a great many writers can relate when Barth says, “it was Faulkner at his most involuted and incantatory who most enchanted me.” For many a writer, the Faulknerian sentence is an irresistible labyrinth. His syntax has a way of weaving itself into the unconscious, emerging as fair to middling imitation. While studying at Johns Hopkins University, Barth found himself writing about his native Eastern Shore Maryland in a pastiche style of “middle Faulkner and late Joyce.” He may have won some praise from a visiting young William Styron, “but the finished opus didn’t fly—for one thing, because Faulkner intimately knew his Snopses and Compsons and Sartorises, as I did not know my made-up denizens of the Maryland marsh.” The advice to write only what you know may not be worth much as a universal commandment. But studying the way that Faulkner wrote when he turned to the subjects he knew best provides an object lesson on how powerful a literary resource intimacy can be. Not only does Faulkner’s deep affiliation with his characters’ inner lives elevate his portraits far above the level of local color or regionalist curiosity, but it animates his sentences, makes them constantly move and breathe. No matter how long and twisted they get, they do not wilt, wither, or drag; they run river-like, turning around in asides, outraging themselves and doubling and tripling back. Faulkner’s intimacy is not earnestness, it is the uncanny feeling of a raw encounter with a nerve center lighting up with information, all of it seemingly critically important. It is the extraordinary sensory quality of his prose that enabled Faulkner to get away with writing the longest sentence in literature, at least according to the 1983 Guinness Book of World Records, a passage from Absalom, Absalom! consisting of ,288 words and who knows how many different kinds of clauses. There are now longer sentences in English writing. Jonathan Coe’s The Rotter’s Club ends with a -page long whopper with ,955 words in it. Entire novels hundreds of pages long have been written in one sentence in other languages. All of Faulkner’s modernist contemporaries, including of course Joyce, Wolff, and Beckett, mastered the use of run-ons, to different effect. But, for a time, Faulkner took the run-on as far as it could go. He may have had no intention of inspiring postmodern fiction, but one of its best-known novelists, Barth, only found his voice by first writing a “heavily Faulknerian marsh-opera.” Many hundreds of experimental writers have had almost identical experiences trying to exorcise the Oxford, Mississippi modernist’s voice from their prose. Read that onetime longest sentence in literature, all ,288 words of it, below. Just exactly like Father if Father had known as much about it the night before I went out there as he did the day after I came back thinking Mad impotent old man who realized at last that there must be some limit even to the capabilities of a demon for doing harm, who must have seen his situation as that of the show girl, the pony, who realizes that the principal tune she prances to comes not from horn and fiddle and drum but from a clock and calendar, must have seen himself as the old wornout cannon which realizes that it can deliver just one more fierce shot and crumble to dust in its own furious blast and recoil, who looked about upon the scene which was still within his scope and compass and saw son gone, vanished, more insuperable to him now than if the son were dead since now (if the son still lived) his name would be different and those to call him by it strangers and whatever dragon’s outcropping of Sutpen blood the son might sow on the body of whatever strange woman would therefore carry on the tradition, accomplish the hereditary evil and harm under another name and upon and among people who will never have heard the right one; daughter doomed to spinsterhood who had chosen spinsterhood already before there was anyone named Charles Bon since the aunt who came to succor her in bereavement and sorrow found neither but instead that calm absolutely impenetrable face between a homespun dress and sunbonnet seen before a closed door and again in a cloudy swirl of chickens while Jones was building the coffin and which she wore during the next year while the aunt lived there and the three women wove their own garments and raised their own food and cut the wood they cooked it with (excusing what help they had from Jones who lived with his granddaughter in the abandoned fishing camp with its collapsing roof and rotting porch against which the rusty scythe which Sutpen was to lend him, make him borrow to cut away the weeds from the door-and at last forced him to use though not to cut weeds, at least not vegetable weeds -would lean for two years) and wore still after the aunt’s indignation had swept her back to town to live on stolen garden truck and out o f anonymous baskets left on her front steps at night, the three of them, the two daughters negro and white and the aunt twelve miles away watching from her distance as the two daughters watched from theirs the old demon, the ancient varicose and despairing Faustus fling his final main now with the Creditor’s hand already on his shoulder, running his little country store now for his bread and meat, haggling tediously over nickels and dimes with rapacious and poverty-stricken whites and negroes, who at one time could have galloped for ten miles in any direction without crossing his own boundary, using out of his meagre stock the cheap ribbons and beads and the stale violently-colored candy with which even an old man can seduce a fifteen-year-old country girl, to ruin the granddaughter o f his partner, this Jones-this gangling malaria-ridden white man whom he had given permission fourteen years ago to squat in the abandoned fishing camp with the year-old grandchild-Jones, partner porter and clerk who at the demon’s command removed with his own hand (and maybe delivered too) from the showcase the candy beads and ribbons, measured the very cloth from which Judith (who had not been bereaved and did not mourn) helped the granddaughter to fashion a dress to walk past the lounging men in, the side-looking and the tongues, until her increasing belly taught her embarrassment-or perhaps fear;-Jones who before ’ had not even been allowed to approach the front of the house and who during the next four years got no nearer than the kitchen door and that only when he brought the game and fish and vegetables on which the seducer-to-be’s wife and daughter (and Clytie too, the one remaining servant, negro, the one who would forbid him to pass the kitchen door with what he brought) depended on to keep life in them, but who now entered the house itself on the (quite frequent now) afternoons when the demon would suddenly curse the store empty of customers and lock the door and repair to the rear and in the same tone in which he used to address his orderly or even his house servants when he had them (and in which he doubtless ordered Jones to fetch from the showcase the ribbons and beads and candy) direct Jones to fetch the jug, the two of them (and Jones even sitting now who in the old days, the old dead Sunday afternoons of monotonous peace which they spent beneath the scuppernong arbor in the back yard, the demon lying in the hammock while Jones squatted against a post, rising from time to time to pour for the demon from the demijohn and the bucket of spring water which he had fetched from the spring more than a mile away then squatting again, chortling and chuckling and saying `Sho, Mister Tawm’ each time the demon paused)-the two of them drinking turn and turn about from the jug and the demon not lying down now nor even sitting but reaching after the third or second drink that old man’s state of impotent and furious undefeat in which he would rise, swaying and plunging and shouting for his horse and pistols to ride single-handed into Washington and shoot Lincoln (a year or so too late here) and Sherman both, shouting, ‘Kill them! Shoot them down like the dogs they are!’ and Jones: ‘Sho, Kernel; sho now’ and catching him as he fell and commandeering the first passing wagon to take him to the house and carry him up the front steps and through the paintless formal door beneath its fanlight imported pane by pane from Europe which Judith held open for him to enter with no change, no alteration in that calm frozen face which she had worn for four years now, and on up the stairs and into the bedroom and put him to bed like a baby and then lie down himself on the floor beside the bed though not to sleep since before dawn the man on the bed would stir and groan and Jones would say, ‘flyer I am, Kernel. Hit’s all right. They aint whupped us yit, air they?’ this Jones who after the demon rode away with the regiment when the granddaughter was only eight years old would tell people that he ‘was lookin after Major’s place and niggers’ even before they had time to ask him why he was not with the troops and perhaps in time came to believe the lie himself, who was among the first to greet the demon when he returned, to meet him at the gate and say, ‘Well, Kernel, they kilt us but they aint whupped us yit, air they?’ who even worked, labored, sweat at the demon’s behest during that first furious period while the demon believed he could restore by sheer indomitable willing the Sutpen’s Hundred which he remembered and had lost, labored with no hope of pay or reward who must have seen long before the demon did (or would admit it) that the task was hopeless-blind Jones who apparently saw still in that furious lecherous wreck the old fine figure of the man who once galloped on the black thoroughbred about that domain two boundaries of which the eye could not see from any point. Related Content: Wonderfully Long Literary Sentences by Samuel Beckett, Virginia Woolf, F. Scott Fitzgerald & Other Masters of the Run-On Seven Tips From William Faulkner on How to Write Fiction William Faulkner Reads from As I Lay Dying Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness .k SHARES Facebook Twitter Reddit by Josh Jones | Permalink | Comments () | Support Open Culture We’re hoping to rely on our loyal readers rather than erratic ads. To support Open Culture’s continued operation, please consider making a donation. We thank you! Comments () You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed. Random1785 says: September , 2019 at : pm Imagine reading a novel with a sentence that was 000 words long! Reply ranouttanameideasandimspendingtoomuchtimethinkingofthem says: November , 2019 at : pm this is absurd. imagine reading this book and being like “jeez this sentence is so long” Reply mikeyliam426@icloud.com says: April , 2020 at : pm Ya know ya got ya ya girl ya ya know ya ya boy you got caught with them and then ya got a robot in the car with a car in your head that was the best dog ever and you can call me and call him when I wanna is it time I get off work I will see if I gotta I wanna is a time I got a ride truck truck ride and iiiuuyr Reply Happy says: April , 2020 at :08 pm How did you do that. the longest thing that I have ever wrote was a 600 word paragraph and I just wrote that. Reply helothereboi says: June , 2020 at : am I think this is so cool that he spent this time on it but who would really read this all Reply Caileb says: June , 2020 at :08 pm omg i have to read this about a week and im done and i just want to say this have made my day Reply arkin says: June , 2020 at :02 pm i have wrote a story which has 12083 words in it. i broke the world record. but they did not give the award because i was a kid :C Reply Judith says: August , 2020 at :05 pm Read this in an hour easily Reply ME says: September , 2020 at : am hi! Reply Jesse Dosch says: November , 2020 at : am I won yay Reply Jesse Dosch says: November , 2020 at : am @arkin “It is supposedly the world’s longest published novel in English at . million words. If you have some extra time, you can read it at marienbadmylove.com. . A la recherche du temps perdu by Marcel Proust.” Reply Jesse Dosch says: November , 2020 at : am @arkin “It is supposedly the world’s longest published novel in English at . million words. If you have some extra time, you can read it at marienbadmylove.com. . A la recherche du temps perdu by Marcel Proust.” Reply Jesse Dosch says: November , 2020 at : am I got a sentence that was 5639 words long Reply this guy says: November , 2020 at : am i just looked it up so can can copy and paste it on my school chat for fun not to read Reply Benjamin says: December , 2020 at : am I just wanted to say, i really like cheese, and…i think…i think my teacher is mad at me sry wait…shes mad because i was asking my other teacher questions about work online… hmmm….my teacher sure is a ##### ass feminist… Reply yurrr says: December , 2020 at : am shutcho pickel chin as up Reply austin says: January , 2021 at :05 pm i just wrote a sentence with ,289 words so ha Reply Leave a Reply NAME (REQUIRED) EMAIL (REQUIRED) MESSAGE Essentials ,500 Free Online Courses 1000+ MOOCs ,150 Free Movies 700 Free Audio Books 150+ Best Podcasts 800 Free eBooks 200 Free Textbooks 300 Free Language Lessons 150 Free Business Courses Free K- Education Get Our Daily Email Support Us We're hoping to rely on loyal readers, rather than erratic ads. Click the Donate button and support Open Culture. We thank you! Free Courses Art & Art History Astronomy Biology Business Chemistry Classics/Ancient World Computer Science Data Science Economics Engineering Environment History Literature Math Philosophy Physics Political Science Psychology Religion Writing & Journalism All 1500 Free Courses 1000+ MOOCs & Certificate Courses Free Movies 1150 Free Movies Online Free Film Noir Silent Films Documentaries Martial Arts/Kung Fu Animations Free Hitchcock Films Free Charlie Chaplin Free John Wayne Movies Free Tarkovsky Films Free Dziga Vertov Free Oscar Winners Free Language Lessons Arabic Chinese English French German Italian Russian Spanish All Languages Free eBooks 700 Free eBooks Free Philosophy eBooks The Harvard Classics Philip K. Dick Stories Neil Gaiman Stories David Foster Wallace Stories & Essays Hemingway Stories Great Gatsby & Other Fitzgerald Novels HP Lovecraft Edgar Allan Poe Free Alice Munro Stories Jennifer Egan Stories George Saunders Stories Hunter S. Thompson Essays Joan Didion Essays Gabriel Garcia Marquez Stories David Sedaris Stories Stephen King Chomsky Golden Age Comics Free Books by UC Press Life Changing Books Free Audio Books 700 Free Audio Books Free Audio Books: Fiction Free Audio Books: Poetry Free Audio Books: Non-Fiction Free Textbooks 200 Free Textbooks Free Physics Textbooks Free Computer Science Textbooks Free Math Textbooks K- Resources Free Books Free Video Lessons Web Resources by Subject Free Language Lessons Quality YouTube Channels Teacher Resources Test Prep All Free Kids Resources Free Art & Images All Art Images & Books The Met The Getty The Rijksmuseum Smithsonian The Guggenheim The Tate The National Gallery The Whitney LA County Museum Stanford University British Library Google Art Project French Revolution Getty Images Guggenheim Art Books Met Art Books Getty Art Books New York Public Library Maps Museum of New Zealand Street Art Smarthistory Rembrandt Van Gogh Coloring Books Free Music All Bach Organ Works All of Bach ,000 Classical Music Scores Free Classical Music Live Classical Music ,000 Grateful Dead Concerts Alan Lomax Blues & Folk Archive Writing Tips Hemingway Fitzgerald Stephen King Ray Bradbury William Zinsser Kurt Vonnegut Toni Morrison Edgar Allan Poe Margaret Atwood David Ogilvy Steinbeck Billy Wilder Archive All posts by date Categories Amazon Kindle Animation Apple Architecture Archives Art Astronomy Audio Books Beat & Tweets Biology Books Business Chemistry Coloring Books Comedy Comics/Cartoons Computer Science Creativity Current Affairs Dance Data Deals Design e-books Economics Education English Language Entrepreneurship Environment Fashion Film Food & Drink Games Gender Google Graduation Speech Harvard Health History How to Learn for Free Internet Archive iPad iPhone Jazz K- Language Language Lessons Law Letters Libraries Life Literature Magazines Maps Math Media MIT MOOCs Most Popular Museums Music Nature Neuroscience Online Courses Opera Philosophy Photography Physics Podcasts Poetry Politics Pretty Much Pop Productivity Psychology Radio Random Religion Sci Fi Science Software Sports Stanford Technology TED Talks Television Theatre Travel Twitter UC Berkeley Uncategorized Video – Arts & Culture Video – Politics/Society Video – Science Video Games Web/Tech Wikipedia Writing Yale YouTube Great Lectures Michel Foucault Sun Ra at UC Berkeley Richard Feynman Joseph Campbell Carl Sagan Margaret Atwood Jorge Luis Borges Leonard Bernstein Richard Dawkins Buckminster Fuller Walter Kaufmann on Existentialism Jacques Lacan Roland Barthes Nobel Lectures by Writers Toni Morrison Bertrand Russell Oxford Philosophy Lectures FREE UPDATES! GET OUR DAILY EMAIL Get the best cultural and educational resources on the web curated for you in a daily email. We never spam. Unsubscribe at any time. FOLLOW ON SOCIAL MEDIA About Us Open Culture scours the web for the best educational media. We find the free courses and audio books you need, the language lessons & educational videos you want, and plenty of enlightenment in between. Advertise With Us Great Recordings T.S. Eliot Reads Waste Land Sylvia Plath - Ariel Joyce Reads Ulysses Joyce - Finnegans Wake Patti Smith Reads Virginia Woolf Albert Einstein Charles Bukowski Bill Murray Hemingway Fitzgerald Reads Shakespeare William Faulkner Flannery O'Connor Tolkien - The Hobbit Allen Ginsberg - Howl W.B Yeats Ezra Pound Dylan Thomas Anne Sexton John Cheever David Foster Wallace Book Lists By Neil deGrasse Tyson Ernest Hemingway F. Scott Fitzgerald Allen Ginsberg Patti Smith Brian Eno Henry Miller Christopher Hitchens Joseph Brodsky W.H. 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All rights reserved. Home About Us Advertise with Us Copyright Policy Privacy Policy Terms of Use Bio Audio Books Online Courses MOOCs Movies Languages Textbooks eBooks Open Culture was founded by Dan How did Faulkner pull it off?” is a question many a fledgling writer has asked themselves while struggling through a period of apprenticeship like that novelist John Barth describes in his 1999 talk “My Faulkner.” Barth “reorchestrated” his literary heroes, he says, “in search of my writerly self… downloading my innumerable predecessors as only an insatiable green apprentice can.” Surely a great many writers can relate when Barth says, “it was Faulkner at his most involuted and incantatory who most enchanted me.” For many a writer, the Faulknerian sentence is an irresistible labyrinth. His syntax has a way of weaving itself into the unconscious, emerging as fair to middling imitation. While studying at Johns Hopkins University, Barth found himself writing about his native Eastern Shore Maryland in a pastiche style of “middle Faulkner and late Joyce.” He may have won some praise from a visiting young William Styron, “but the finished opus didn’t fly—for one thing, because Faulkner intimately knew his Snopses and Compsons and Sartorises, as I did not know my made-up denizens of the Maryland marsh.” The advice to write only what you know may not be worth much as a universal commandment. But studying the way that Faulkner wrote when he turned to the subjects he knew best provides an object lesson on how powerful a literary resource intimacy can be. Not only does Faulkner’s deep affiliation with his characters’ inner lives elevate his portraits far above the level of local color or regionalist curiosity, but it animates his sentences, makes them constantly move and breathe. No matter how long and twisted they get, they do not wilt, wither, or drag; they run river-like, turning around in asides, outraging themselves and doubling and tripling back. Faulkner’s intimacy is not earnestness, it is the uncanny feeling of a raw encounter with a nerve center lighting up with information, all of it seemingly critically important. It is the extraordinary sensory quality of his prose that enabled Faulkner to get away with writing the longest sentence in literature, at least according to the 1983 Guinness Book of World Records, a passage from Absalom, Absalom! consisting of ,288 words and who knows how many different kinds of clauses. There are now longer sentences in English writing. Jonathan Coe’s The Rotter’s Club ends with a -page long whopper with ,955 words in it. Entire novels hundreds of pages long have been written in one sentence in other languages. All of Faulkner’s modernist contemporaries, including of course Joyce, Wolff, and Beckett, mastered the use of run-ons, to different effect. But, for a time, Faulkner took the run-on as far as it could go. He may have had no intention of inspiring postmodern fiction, but one of its best-known novelists, Barth, only found his voice by first writing a “heavily Faulknerian marsh-opera.” Many hundreds of experimental writers have had almost identical experiences trying to exorcise the Oxford, Mississippi modernist’s voice from their prose. Read that onetime longest sentence in literature, all ,288 words of it, below. Just exactly like Father if Father had known as much about it the night before I went out there as he did the day after I came back thinking Mad impotent old man who realized at last that there must be some limit even to the capabilities of a demon for doing harm, who must have seen his situation as that of the show girl, the pony, who realizes that the principal tune she prances to comes not from horn and fiddle and drum but from a clock and calendar, must have seen himself as the old wornout cannon which realizes that it can deliver just one more fierce shot and crumble to dust in its own furious blast and recoil, who looked about upon the scene which was still within his scope and compass and saw son gone, vanished, more insuperable to him now than if the son were dead since now (if the son still lived) his name would be different and those to call him by it strangers and whatever dragon’s outcropping of Sutpen blood the son might sow on the body of whatever strange woman would therefore carry on the tradition, accomplish the hereditary evil and harm under another name and upon and among people who will never have heard the right one; daughter doomed to spinsterhood who had chosen spinsterhood already before there was anyone named Charles Bon since the aunt who came to succor her in bereavement and sorrow found neither but instead that calm absolutely impenetrable face between a homespun dress and sunbonnet seen before a closed door and again in a cloudy swirl of chickens while Jones was building the coffin and which she wore during the next year while the aunt lived there and the three women wove their own garments and raised their own food and cut the wood they cooked it with (excusing what help they had from Jones who lived with his granddaughter in the abandoned fishing camp with its collapsing roof and rotting porch against which the rusty scythe which Sutpen was to lend him, make him borrow to cut away the weeds from the door-and at last forced him to use though not to cut weeds, at least not vegetable weeds -would lean for two years) and wore still after the aunt’s indignation had swept her back to town to live on stolen garden truck and out o f anonymous baskets left on her front steps at night, the three of them, the two daughters negro and white and the aunt twelve miles away watching from her distance as the two daughters watched from theirs the old demon, the ancient varicose and despairing Faustus fling his final main now with the Creditor’s hand already on his shoulder, running his little country store now for his bread and meat, haggling tediously over nickels and dimes with rapacious and poverty-stricken whites and negroes, who at one time could have galloped for ten miles in any direction without crossing his own boundary, using out of his meagre stock the cheap ribbons and beads and the stale violently-colored candy with which even an old man can seduce a fifteen-year-old country girl, to ruin the granddaughter o f his partner, this Jones-this gangling malaria-ridden white man whom he had given permission fourteen years ago to squat in the abandoned fishing camp with the year-old grandchild-Jones, partner porter and clerk who at the demon’s command removed with his own hand (and maybe delivered too) from the showcase the candy beads and ribbons, measured the very cloth from which Judith (who had not been bereaved and did not mourn) helped the granddaughter to fashion a dress to walk past the lounging men in, the side-looking and the tongues, until her increasing belly taught her embarrassment-or perhaps fear;-Jones who before ’ had not even been allowed to approach the front of the house and who during the next four years got no nearer than the kitchen door and that only when he brought the game and fish and vegetables on which the seducer-to-be’s wife and daughter (and Clytie too, the one remaining servant, negro, the one who would forbid him to pass the kitchen door with what he brought) depended on to keep life in them, but who now entered the house itself on the (quite frequent now) afternoons when the demon would suddenly curse the store empty of customers and lock the door and repair to the rear and in the same tone in which he used to address his orderly or even his house servants when he had them (and in which he doubtless ordered Jones to fetch from the showcase the ribbons and beads and candy) direct Jones to fetch the jug, the two of them (and Jones even sitting now who in the old days, the old dead Sunday afternoons of monotonous peace which they spent beneath the scuppernong arbor in the back yard, the demon lying in the hammock while Jones squatted against a post, rising from time to time to pour for the demon from the demijohn and the bucket of spring water which he had fetched from the spring more than a mile away then squatting again, chortling and chuckling and saying `Sho, Mister Tawm’ each time the demon paused)-the two of them drinking turn and turn about from the jug and the demon not lying down now nor even sitting but reaching after the third or second drink that old man’s state of impotent and furious undefeat in which he would rise, swaying and plunging and shouting for his horse and pistols to ride single-handed into Washington and shoot Lincoln (a year or so too late here) and Sherman both, shouting, ‘Kill them! Shoot them down like the dogs they are!’ and Jones: ‘Sho, Kernel; sho now’ and catching him as he fell and commandeering the first passing wagon to take him to the house and carry him up the front steps and through the paintless formal door beneath its fanlight imported pane by pane from Europe which Judith held open for him to enter with no change, no alteration in that calm frozen face which she had worn for four years now, and on up the stairs and into the bedroom and put him to bed like a baby and then lie down himself on the floor beside the bed though not to sleep since before dawn the man on the bed would stir and groan and Jones would say, ‘flyer I am, Kernel. Hit’s all right. They aint whupped us yit, air they?’ this Jones who after the demon rode away with the regiment when the granddaughter was only eight years old would tell people that he ‘was lookin after Major’s place and niggers’ even before they had time to ask him why he was not with the troops and perhaps in time came to believe the lie himself, who was among the first to greet the demon when he returned, to meet him at the gate and say, ‘Well, Kernel, they kilt us but they aint whupped us yit, air they?’ who even worked, labored, sweat at the demon’s behest during that first furious period while the demon believed he could restore by sheer indomitable willing the Sutpen’s Hundred which he remembered and had lost, labored with no hope of pay or reward who must have seen long before the demon did (or would admit it) that the task was hopeless-blind Jones who apparently saw still in that furious lecherous wreck the old fine figure of the man who once galloped on the black thoroughbred about that domain two boundaries of which the eye could not see from any point. Related Content: Wonderfully Long Literary Sentences by Samuel Beckett, Virginia Woolf, F. Scott Fitzgerald & Other Masters of the Run-On Seven Tips From William Faulkner on How to Write Fiction William Faulkner Reads from As I Lay Dying Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness .k SHARES Facebook Twitter Reddit by Josh Jones | Permalink | Comments () | Support Open Culture We’re hoping to rely on our loyal readers rather than erratic ads. To support Open Culture’s continued operation, please consider making a donation. We thank you! Comments () You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed. Random1785 says: September , 2019 at : pm Imagine reading a novel with a sentence that was 000 words long! Reply ranouttanameideasandimspendingtoomuchtimethinkingofthem says: November , 2019 at : pm this is absurd. imagine reading this book and being like “jeez this sentence is so long” Reply mikeyliam426@icloud.com says: April , 2020 at : pm Ya know ya got ya ya girl ya ya know ya ya boy you got caught with them and then ya got a robot in the car with a car in your head that was the best dog ever and you can call me and call him when I wanna is it time I get off work I will see if I gotta I wanna is a time I got a ride truck truck ride and iiiuuyr Reply Happy says: April , 2020 at :08 pm How did you do that. the longest thing that I have ever wrote was a 600 word paragraph and I just wrote that. Reply helothereboi says: June , 2020 at : am I think this is so cool that he spent this time on it but who would really read this all Reply Caileb says: June , 2020 at :08 pm omg i have to read this about a week and im done and i just want to say this have made my day Reply arkin says: June , 2020 at :02 pm i have wrote a story which has 12083 words in it. i broke the world record. but they did not give the award because i was a kid :C Reply Judith says: August , 2020 at :05 pm Read this in an hour easily Reply ME says: September , 2020 at : am hi! Reply Jesse Dosch says: November , 2020 at : am I won yay Reply Jesse Dosch says: November , 2020 at : am @arkin “It is supposedly the world’s longest published novel in English at . million words. If you have some extra time, you can read it at marienbadmylove.com. . A la recherche du temps perdu by Marcel Proust.” Reply Jesse Dosch says: November , 2020 at : am @arkin “It is supposedly the world’s longest published novel in English at . million words. If you have some extra time, you can read it at marienbadmylove.com. . A la recherche du temps perdu by Marcel Proust.” Reply Jesse Dosch says: November , 2020 at : am I got a sentence that was 5639 words long Reply this guy says: November , 2020 at : am i just looked it up so can can copy and paste it on my school chat for fun not to read Reply Benjamin says: December , 2020 at : am I just wanted to say, i really like cheese, and…i think…i think my teacher is mad at me sry wait…shes mad because i was asking my other teacher questions about work online… hmmm….my teacher sure is a ##### ass feminist… Reply yurrr says: December , 2020 at : am shutcho pickel chin as up Reply austin says: January , 2021 at :05 pm i just wrote a sentence with ,289 words so ha Reply Leave a Reply NAME (REQUIRED) EMAIL (REQUIRED) MESSAGE Essentials ,500 Free Online Courses 1000+ MOOCs ,150 Free Movies 700 Free Audio Books 150+ Best Podcasts 800 Free eBooks 200 Free Textbooks 300 Free Language Lessons 150 Free Business Courses Free K- Education Get Our Daily Email Support Us We're hoping to rely on loyal readers, rather than erratic ads. 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All rights reserved. Home About Us Advertise with Us Copyright Policy Privacy Policy Terms of Use Bio Audio Books Online Courses MOOCs Movies Languages Textbooks eBooks Open Culture was founded by Dan How did Faulkner pull it off?” is a question many a fledgling writer has asked themselves while struggling through a period of apprenticeship like that novelist John Barth describes in his 1999 talk “My Faulkner.” Barth “reorchestrated” his literary heroes, he says, “in search of my writerly self… downloading my innumerable predecessors as only an insatiable green apprentice can.” Surely a great many writers can relate when Barth says, “it was Faulkner at his most involuted and incantatory who most enchanted me.” For many a writer, the Faulknerian sentence is an irresistible labyrinth. His syntax has a way of weaving itself into the unconscious, emerging as fair to middling imitation. While studying at Johns Hopkins University, Barth found himself writing about his native Eastern Shore Maryland in a pastiche style of “middle Faulkner and late Joyce.” He may have won some praise from a visiting young William Styron, “but the finished opus didn’t fly—for one thing, because Faulkner intimately knew his Snopses and Compsons and Sartorises, as I did not know my made-up denizens of the Maryland marsh.” The advice to write only what you know may not be worth much as a universal commandment. But studying the way that Faulkner wrote when he turned to the subjects he knew best provides an object lesson on how powerful a literary resource intimacy can be. Not only does Faulkner’s deep affiliation with his characters’ inner lives elevate his portraits far above the level of local color or regionalist curiosity, but it animates his sentences, makes them constantly move and breathe. No matter how long and twisted they get, they do not wilt, wither, or drag; they run river-like, turning around in asides, outraging themselves and doubling and tripling back. Faulkner’s intimacy is not earnestness, it is the uncanny feeling of a raw encounter with a nerve center lighting up with information, all of it seemingly critically important. It is the extraordinary sensory quality of his prose that enabled Faulkner to get away with writing the longest sentence in literature, at least according to the 1983 Guinness Book of World Records, a passage from Absalom, Absalom! consisting of ,288 words and who knows how many different kinds of clauses. There are now longer sentences in English writing. Jonathan Coe’s The Rotter’s Club ends with a -page long whopper with ,955 words in it. Entire novels hundreds of pages long have been written in one sentence in other languages. All of Faulkner’s modernist contemporaries, including of course Joyce, Wolff, and Beckett, mastered the use of run-ons, to different effect. But, for a time, Faulkner took the run-on as far as it could go. He may have had no intention of inspiring postmodern fiction, but one of its best-known novelists, Barth, only found his voice by first writing a “heavily Faulknerian marsh-opera.” Many hundreds of experimental writers have had almost identical experiences trying to exorcise the Oxford, Mississippi modernist’s voice from their prose. Read that onetime longest sentence in literature, all ,288 words of it, below. Just exactly like Father if Father had known as much about it the night before I went out there as he did the day after I came back thinking Mad impotent old man who realized at last that there must be some limit even to the capabilities of a demon for doing harm, who must have seen his situation as that of the show girl, the pony, who realizes that the principal tune she prances to comes not from horn and fiddle and drum but from a clock and calendar, must have seen himself as the old wornout cannon which realizes that it can deliver just one more fierce shot and crumble to dust in its own furious blast and recoil, who looked about upon the scene which was still within his scope and compass and saw son gone, vanished, more insuperable to him now than if the son were dead since now (if the son still lived) his name would be different and those to call him by it strangers and whatever dragon’s outcropping of Sutpen blood the son might sow on the body of whatever strange woman would therefore carry on the tradition, accomplish the hereditary evil and harm under another name and upon and among people who will never have heard the right one; daughter doomed to spinsterhood who had chosen spinsterhood already before there was anyone named Charles Bon since the aunt who came to succor her in bereavement and sorrow found neither but instead that calm absolutely impenetrable face between a homespun dress and sunbonnet seen before a closed door and again in a cloudy swirl of chickens while Jones was building the coffin and which she wore during the next year while the aunt lived there and the three women wove their own garments and raised their own food and cut the wood they cooked it with (excusing what help they had from Jones who lived with his granddaughter in the abandoned fishing camp with its collapsing roof and rotting porch against which the rusty scythe which Sutpen was to lend him, make him borrow to cut away the weeds from the door-and at last forced him to use though not to cut weeds, at least not vegetable weeds -would lean for two years) and wore still after the aunt’s indignation had swept her back to town to live on stolen garden truck and out o f anonymous baskets left on her front steps at night, the three of them, the two daughters negro and white and the aunt twelve miles away watching from her distance as the two daughters watched from theirs the old demon, the ancient varicose and despairing Faustus fling his final main now with the Creditor’s hand already on his shoulder, running his little country store now for his bread and meat, haggling tediously over nickels and dimes with rapacious and poverty-stricken whites and negroes, who at one time could have galloped for ten miles in any direction without crossing his own boundary, using out of his meagre stock the cheap ribbons and beads and the stale violently-colored candy with which even an old man can seduce a fifteen-year-old country girl, to ruin the granddaughter o f his partner, this Jones-this gangling malaria-ridden white man whom he had given permission fourteen years ago to squat in the abandoned fishing camp with the year-old grandchild-Jones, partner porter and clerk who at the demon’s command removed with his own hand (and maybe delivered too) from the showcase the candy beads and ribbons, measured the very cloth from which Judith (who had not been bereaved and did not mourn) helped the granddaughter to fashion a dress to walk past the lounging men in, the side-looking and the tongues, until her increasing belly taught her embarrassment-or perhaps fear;-Jones who before ’ had not even been allowed to approach the front of the house and who during the next four years got no nearer than the kitchen door and that only when he brought the game and fish and vegetables on which the seducer-to-be’s wife and daughter (and Clytie too, the one remaining servant, negro, the one who would forbid him to pass the kitchen door with what he brought) depended on to keep life in them, but who now entered the house itself on the (quite frequent now) afternoons when the demon would suddenly curse the store empty of customers and lock the door and repair to the rear and in the same tone in which he used to address his orderly or even his house servants when he had them (and in which he doubtless ordered Jones to fetch from the showcase the ribbons and beads and candy) direct Jones to fetch the jug, the two of them (and Jones even sitting now who in the old days, the old dead Sunday afternoons of monotonous peace which they spent beneath the scuppernong arbor in the back yard, the demon lying in the hammock while Jones squatted against a post, rising from time to time to pour for the demon from the demijohn and the bucket of spring water which he had fetched from the spring more than a mile away then squatting again, chortling and chuckling and saying `Sho, Mister Tawm’ each time the demon paused)-the two of them drinking turn and turn about from the jug and the demon not lying down now nor even sitting but reaching after the third or second drink that old man’s state of impotent and furious undefeat in which he would rise, swaying and plunging and shouting for his horse and pistols to ride single-handed into Washington and shoot Lincoln (a year or so too late here) and Sherman both, shouting, ‘Kill them! Shoot them down like the dogs they are!’ and Jones: ‘Sho, Kernel; sho now’ and catching him as he fell and commandeering the first passing wagon to take him to the house and carry him up the front steps and through the paintless formal door beneath its fanlight imported pane by pane from Europe which Judith held open for him to enter with no change, no alteration in that calm frozen face which she had worn for four years now, and on up the stairs and into the bedroom and put him to bed like a baby and then lie down himself on the floor beside the bed though not to sleep since before dawn the man on the bed would stir and groan and Jones would say, ‘flyer I am, Kernel. Hit’s all right. They aint whupped us yit, air they?’ this Jones who after the demon rode away with the regiment when the granddaughter was only eight years old would tell people that he ‘was lookin after Major’s place and niggers’ even before they had time to ask him why he was not with the troops and perhaps in time came to believe the lie himself, who was among the first to greet the demon when he returned, to meet him at the gate and say, ‘Well, Kernel, they kilt us but they aint whupped us yit, air they?’ who even worked, labored, sweat at the demon’s behest during that first furious period while the demon believed he could restore by sheer indomitable willing the Sutpen’s Hundred which he remembered and had lost, labored with no hope of pay or reward who must have seen long before the demon did (or would admit it) that the task was hopeless-blind Jones who apparently saw still in that furious lecherous wreck the old fine figure of the man who once galloped on the black thoroughbred about that domain two boundaries of which the eye could not see from any point. Related Content: Wonderfully Long Literary Sentences by Samuel Beckett, Virginia Woolf, F. Scott Fitzgerald & Other Masters of the Run-On Seven Tips From William Faulkner on How to Write Fiction William Faulkner Reads from As I Lay Dying Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness .k SHARES Facebook Twitter Reddit by Josh Jones | Permalink | Comments () | Support Open Culture We’re hoping to rely on our loyal readers rather than erratic ads. To support Open Culture’s continued operation, please consider making a donation. We thank you! Comments () You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed. Random1785 says: September , 2019 at : pm Imagine reading a novel with a sentence that was 000 words long! Reply ranouttanameideasandimspendingtoomuchtimethinkingofthem says: November , 2019 at : pm this is absurd. imagine reading this book and being like “jeez this sentence is so long” Reply mikeyliam426@icloud.com says: April , 2020 at : pm Ya know ya got ya ya girl ya ya know ya ya boy you got caught with them and then ya got a robot in the car with a car in your head that was the best dog ever and you can call me and call him when I wanna is it time I get off work I will see if I gotta I wanna is a time I got a ride truck truck ride and iiiuuyr Reply Happy says: April , 2020 at :08 pm How did you do that. the longest thing that I have ever wrote was a 600 word paragraph and I just wrote that. Reply helothereboi says: June , 2020 at : am I think this is so cool that he spent this time on it but who would really read this all Reply Caileb says: June , 2020 at :08 pm omg i have to read this about a week and im done and i just want to say this have made my day Reply arkin says: June , 2020 at :02 pm i have wrote a story which has 12083 words in it. i broke the world record. but they did not give the award because i was a kid :C Reply Judith says: August , 2020 at :05 pm Read this in an hour easily Reply ME says: September , 2020 at : am hi! Reply Jesse Dosch says: November , 2020 at : am I won yay Reply Jesse Dosch says: November , 2020 at : am @arkin “It is supposedly the world’s longest published novel in English at . million words. If you have some extra time, you can read it at marienbadmylove.com. . A la recherche du temps perdu by Marcel Proust.” Reply Jesse Dosch says: November , 2020 at : am @arkin “It is supposedly the world’s longest published novel in English at . million words. If you have some extra time, you can read it at marienbadmylove.com. . A la recherche du temps perdu by Marcel Proust.” Reply Jesse Dosch says: November , 2020 at : am I got a sentence that was 5639 words long Reply this guy says: November , 2020 at : am i just looked it up so can can copy and paste it on my school chat for fun not to read Reply Benjamin says: December , 2020 at : am I just wanted to say, i really like cheese, and…i think…i think my teacher is mad at me sry wait…shes mad because i was asking my other teacher questions about work online… hmmm….my teacher sure is a ##### ass feminist… Reply yurrr says: December , 2020 at : am shutcho pickel chin as up Reply austin says: January , 2021 at :05 pm i just wrote a sentence with ,289 words so ha Reply Leave a Reply NAME (REQUIRED) EMAIL (REQUIRED) MESSAGE Essentials ,500 Free Online Courses 1000+ MOOCs ,150 Free Movies 700 Free Audio Books 150+ Best Podcasts 800 Free eBooks 200 Free Textbooks 300 Free Language Lessons 150 Free Business Courses Free K- Education Get Our Daily Email Support Us We're hoping to rely on loyal readers, rather than erratic ads. Click the Donate button and support Open Culture. We thank you! Free Courses Art & Art History Astronomy Biology Business Chemistry Classics/Ancient World Computer Science Data Science Economics Engineering Environment History Literature Math Philosophy Physics Political Science Psychology Religion Writing & Journalism All 1500 Free Courses 1000+ MOOCs & Certificate Courses Free Movies 1150 Free Movies Online Free Film Noir Silent Films Documentaries Martial Arts/Kung Fu Animations Free Hitchcock Films Free Charlie Chaplin Free John Wayne Movies Free Tarkovsky Films Free Dziga Vertov Free Oscar Winners Free Language Lessons Arabic Chinese English French German Italian Russian Spanish All Languages Free eBooks 700 Free eBooks Free Philosophy eBooks The Harvard Classics Philip K. 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All rights reserved. Home About Us Advertise with Us Copyright Policy Privacy Policy Terms of Use Bio Audio Books Online Courses MOOCs Movies Languages Textbooks eBooks Open Culture was founded by Dan How did Faulkner pull it off?” is a question many a fledgling writer has asked themselves while struggling through a period of apprenticeship like that novelist John Barth describes in his 1999 talk “My Faulkner.” Barth “reorchestrated” his literary heroes, he says, “in search of my writerly self… downloading my innumerable predecessors as only an insatiable green apprentice can.” Surely a great many writers can relate when Barth says, “it was Faulkner at his most involuted and incantatory who most enchanted me.” For many a writer, the Faulknerian sentence is an irresistible labyrinth. His syntax has a way of weaving itself into the unconscious, emerging as fair to middling imitation. While studying at Johns Hopkins University, Barth found himself writing about his native Eastern Shore Maryland in a pastiche style of “middle Faulkner and late Joyce.” He may have won some praise from a visiting young William Styron, “but the finished opus didn’t fly—for one thing, because Faulkner intimately knew his Snopses and Compsons and Sartorises, as I did not know my made-up denizens of the Maryland marsh.” The advice to write only what you know may not be worth much as a universal commandment. But studying the way that Faulkner wrote when he turned to the subjects he knew best provides an object lesson on how powerful a literary resource intimacy can be. Not only does Faulkner’s deep affiliation with his characters’ inner lives elevate his portraits far above the level of local color or regionalist curiosity, but it animates his sentences, makes them constantly move and breathe. No matter how long and twisted they get, they do not wilt, wither, or drag; they run river-like, turning around in asides, outraging themselves and doubling and tripling back. Faulkner’s intimacy is not earnestness, it is the uncanny feeling of a raw encounter with a nerve center lighting up with information, all of it seemingly critically important. It is the extraordinary sensory quality of his prose that enabled Faulkner to get away with writing the longest sentence in literature, at least according to the 1983 Guinness Book of World Records, a passage from Absalom, Absalom! consisting of ,288 words and who knows how many different kinds of clauses. There are now longer sentences in English writing. Jonathan Coe’s The Rotter’s Club ends with a -page long whopper with ,955 words in it. Entire novels hundreds of pages long have been written in one sentence in other languages. All of Faulkner’s modernist contemporaries, including of course Joyce, Wolff, and Beckett, mastered the use of run-ons, to different effect. But, for a time, Faulkner took the run-on as far as it could go. He may have had no intention of inspiring postmodern fiction, but one of its best-known novelists, Barth, only found his voice by first writing a “heavily Faulknerian marsh-opera.” Many hundreds of experimental writers have had almost identical experiences trying to exorcise the Oxford, Mississippi modernist’s voice from their prose. Read that onetime longest sentence in literature, all ,288 words of it, below. Just exactly like Father if Father had known as much about it the night before I went out there as he did the day after I came back thinking Mad impotent old man who realized at last that there must be some limit even to the capabilities of a demon for doing harm, who must have seen his situation as that of the show girl, the pony, who realizes that the principal tune she prances to comes not from horn and fiddle and drum but from a clock and calendar, must have seen himself as the old wornout cannon which realizes that it can deliver just one more fierce shot and crumble to dust in its own furious blast and recoil, who looked about upon the scene which was still within his scope and compass and saw son gone, vanished, more insuperable to him now than if the son were dead since now (if the son still lived) his name would be different and those to call him by it strangers and whatever dragon’s outcropping of Sutpen blood the son might sow on the body of whatever strange woman would therefore carry on the tradition, accomplish the hereditary evil and harm under another name and upon and among people who will never have heard the right one; daughter doomed to spinsterhood who had chosen spinsterhood already before there was anyone named Charles Bon since the aunt who came to succor her in bereavement and sorrow found neither but instead that calm absolutely impenetrable face between a homespun dress and sunbonnet seen before a closed door and again in a cloudy swirl of chickens while Jones was building the coffin and which she wore during the next year while the aunt lived there and the three women wove their own garments and raised their own food and cut the wood they cooked it with (excusing what help they had from Jones who lived with his granddaughter in the abandoned fishing camp with its collapsing roof and rotting porch against which the rusty scythe which Sutpen was to lend him, make him borrow to cut away the weeds from the door-and at last forced him to use though not to cut weeds, at least not vegetable weeds -would lean for two years) and wore still after the aunt’s indignation had swept her back to town to live on stolen garden truck and out o f anonymous baskets left on her front steps at night, the three of them, the two daughters negro and white and the aunt twelve miles away watching from her distance as the two daughters watched from theirs the old demon, the ancient varicose and despairing Faustus fling his final main now with the Creditor’s hand already on his shoulder, running his little country store now for his bread and meat, haggling tediously over nickels and dimes with rapacious and poverty-stricken whites and negroes, who at one time could have galloped for ten miles in any direction without crossing his own boundary, using out of his meagre stock the cheap ribbons and beads and the stale violently-colored candy with which even an old man can seduce a fifteen-year-old country girl, to ruin the granddaughter o f his partner, this Jones-this gangling malaria-ridden white man whom he had given permission fourteen years ago to squat in the abandoned fishing camp with the year-old grandchild-Jones, partner porter and clerk who at the demon’s command removed with his own hand (and maybe delivered too) from the showcase the candy beads and ribbons, measured the very cloth from which Judith (who had not been bereaved and did not mourn) helped the granddaughter to fashion a dress to walk past the lounging men in, the side-looking and the tongues, until her increasing belly taught her embarrassment-or perhaps fear;-Jones who before ’ had not even been allowed to approach the front of the house and who during the next four years got no nearer than the kitchen door and that only when he brought the game and fish and vegetables on which the seducer-to-be’s wife and daughter (and Clytie too, the one remaining servant, negro, the one who would forbid him to pass the kitchen door with what he brought) depended on to keep life in them, but who now entered the house itself on the (quite frequent now) afternoons when the demon would suddenly curse the store empty of customers and lock the door and repair to the rear and in the same tone in which he used to address his orderly or even his house servants when he had them (and in which he doubtless ordered Jones to fetch from the showcase the ribbons and beads and candy) direct Jones to fetch the jug, the two of them (and Jones even sitting now who in the old days, the old dead Sunday afternoons of monotonous peace which they spent beneath the scuppernong arbor in the back yard, the demon lying in the hammock while Jones squatted against a post, rising from time to time to pour for the demon from the demijohn and the bucket of spring water which he had fetched from the spring more than a mile away then squatting again, chortling and chuckling and saying `Sho, Mister Tawm’ each time the demon paused)-the two of them drinking turn and turn about from the jug and the demon not lying down now nor even sitting but reaching after the third or second drink that old man’s state of impotent and furious undefeat in which he would rise, swaying and plunging and shouting for his horse and pistols to ride single-handed into Washington and shoot Lincoln (a year or so too late here) and Sherman both, shouting, ‘Kill them! Shoot them down like the dogs they are!’ and Jones: ‘Sho, Kernel; sho now’ and catching him as he fell and commandeering the first passing wagon to take him to the house and carry him up the front steps and through the paintless formal door beneath its fanlight imported pane by pane from Europe which Judith held open for him to enter with no change, no alteration in that calm frozen face which she had worn for four years now, and on up the stairs and into the bedroom and put him to bed like a baby and then lie down himself on the floor beside the bed though not to sleep since before dawn the man on the bed would stir and groan and Jones would say, ‘flyer I am, Kernel. Hit’s all right. They aint whupped us yit, air they?’ this Jones who after the demon rode away with the regiment when the granddaughter was only eight years old would tell people that he ‘was lookin after Major’s place and niggers’ even before they had time to ask him why he was not with the troops and perhaps in time came to believe the lie himself, who was among the first to greet the demon when he returned, to meet him at the gate and say, ‘Well, Kernel, they kilt us but they aint whupped us yit, air they?’ who even worked, labored, sweat at the demon’s behest during that first furious period while the demon believed he could restore by sheer indomitable willing the Sutpen’s Hundred which he remembered and had lost, labored with no hope of pay or reward who must have seen long before the demon did (or would admit it) that the task was hopeless-blind Jones who apparently saw still in that furious lecherous wreck the old fine figure of the man who once galloped on the black thoroughbred about that domain two boundaries of which the eye could not see from any point. Related Content: Wonderfully Long Literary Sentences by Samuel Beckett, Virginia Woolf, F. Scott Fitzgerald & Other Masters of the Run-On Seven Tips From William Faulkner on How to Write Fiction William Faulkner Reads from As I Lay Dying Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness .k SHARES Facebook Twitter Reddit by Josh Jones | Permalink | Comments () | Support Open Culture We’re hoping to rely on our loyal readers rather than erratic ads. To support Open Culture’s continued operation, please consider making a donation. We thank you! Comments () You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed. Random1785 says: September , 2019 at : pm Imagine reading a novel with a sentence that was 000 words long! Reply ranouttanameideasandimspendingtoomuchtimethinkingofthem says: November , 2019 at : pm this is absurd. imagine reading this book and being like “jeez this sentence is so long” Reply mikeyliam426@icloud.com says: April , 2020 at : pm Ya know ya got ya ya girl ya ya know ya ya boy you got caught with them and then ya got a robot in the car with a car in your head that was the best dog ever and you can call me and call him when I wanna is it time I get off work I will see if I gotta I wanna is a time I got a ride truck truck ride and iiiuuyr Reply Happy says: April , 2020 at :08 pm How did you do that. the longest thing that I have ever wrote was a 600 word paragraph and I just wrote that. Reply helothereboi says: June , 2020 at : am I think this is so cool that he spent this time on it but who would really read this all Reply Caileb says: June , 2020 at :08 pm omg i have to read this about a week and im done and i just want to say this have made my day Reply arkin says: June , 2020 at :02 pm i have wrote a story which has 12083 words in it. i broke the world record. but they did not give the award because i was a kid :C Reply Judith says: August , 2020 at :05 pm Read this in an hour easily Reply ME says: September , 2020 at : am hi! Reply Jesse Dosch says: November , 2020 at : am I won yay Reply Jesse Dosch says: November , 2020 at : am @arkin “It is supposedly the world’s longest published novel in English at . million words. If you have some extra time, you can read it at marienbadmylove.com. . A la recherche du temps perdu by Marcel Proust.” Reply Jesse Dosch says: November , 2020 at : am @arkin “It is supposedly the world’s longest published novel in English at . million words. If you have some extra time, you can read it at marienbadmylove.com. . A la recherche du temps perdu by Marcel Proust.” Reply Jesse Dosch says: November , 2020 at : am I got a sentence that was 5639 words long Reply this guy says: November , 2020 at : am i just looked it up so can can copy and paste it on my school chat for fun not to read Reply Benjamin says: December , 2020 at : am I just wanted to say, i really like cheese, and…i think…i think my teacher is mad at me sry wait…shes mad because i was asking my other teacher questions about work online… hmmm….my teacher sure is a ##### ass feminist… Reply yurrr says: December , 2020 at : am shutcho pickel chin as up Reply austin says: January , 2021 at :05 pm i just wrote a sentence with ,289 words so ha Reply Leave a Reply NAME (REQUIRED) EMAIL (REQUIRED) MESSAGE Essentials ,500 Free Online Courses 1000+ MOOCs ,150 Free Movies 700 Free Audio Books 150+ Best Podcasts 800 Free eBooks 200 Free Textbooks 300 Free Language Lessons 150 Free Business Courses Free K- Education Get Our Daily Email Support Us We're hoping to rely on loyal readers, rather than erratic ads. Click the Donate button and support Open Culture. We thank you! Free Courses Art & Art History Astronomy Biology Business Chemistry Classics/Ancient World Computer Science Data Science Economics Engineering Environment History Literature Math Philosophy Physics Political Science Psychology Religion Writing & Journalism All 1500 Free Courses 1000+ MOOCs & Certificate Courses Free Movies 1150 Free Movies Online Free Film Noir Silent Films Documentaries Martial Arts/Kung Fu Animations Free Hitchcock Films Free Charlie Chaplin Free John Wayne Movies Free Tarkovsky Films Free Dziga Vertov Free Oscar Winners Free Language Lessons Arabic Chinese English French German Italian Russian Spanish All Languages Free eBooks 700 Free eBooks Free Philosophy eBooks The Harvard Classics Philip K. Dick Stories Neil Gaiman Stories David Foster Wallace Stories & Essays Hemingway Stories Great Gatsby & Other Fitzgerald Novels HP Lovecraft Edgar Allan Poe Free Alice Munro Stories Jennifer Egan Stories George Saunders Stories Hunter S. Thompson Essays Joan Didion Essays Gabriel Garcia Marquez Stories David Sedaris Stories Stephen King Chomsky Golden Age Comics Free Books by UC Press Life Changing Books Free Audio Books 700 Free Audio Books Free Audio Books: Fiction Free Audio Books: Poetry Free Audio Books: Non-Fiction Free Textbooks 200 Free Textbooks Free Physics Textbooks Free Computer Science Textbooks Free Math Textbooks K- Resources Free Books Free Video Lessons Web Resources by Subject Free Language Lessons Quality YouTube Channels Teacher Resources Test Prep All Free Kids Resources Free Art & Images All Art Images & Books The Met The Getty The Rijksmuseum Smithsonian The Guggenheim The Tate The National Gallery The Whitney LA County Museum Stanford University British Library Google Art Project French Revolution Getty Images Guggenheim Art Books Met Art Books Getty Art Books New York Public Library Maps Museum of New Zealand Street Art Smarthistory Rembrandt Van Gogh Coloring Books Free Music All Bach Organ Works All of Bach ,000 Classical Music Scores Free Classical Music Live Classical Music ,000 Grateful Dead Concerts Alan Lomax Blues & Folk Archive Writing Tips Hemingway Fitzgerald Stephen King Ray Bradbury William Zinsser Kurt Vonnegut Toni Morrison Edgar Allan Poe Margaret Atwood David Ogilvy Steinbeck Billy Wilder Archive All posts by date Categories Amazon Kindle Animation Apple Architecture Archives Art Astronomy Audio Books Beat & Tweets Biology Books Business Chemistry Coloring Books Comedy Comics/Cartoons Computer Science Creativity Current Affairs Dance Data Deals Design e-books Economics Education English Language Entrepreneurship Environment Fashion Film Food & Drink Games Gender Google Graduation Speech Harvard Health History How to Learn for Free Internet Archive iPad iPhone Jazz K- Language Language Lessons Law Letters Libraries Life Literature Magazines Maps Math Media MIT MOOCs Most Popular Museums Music Nature Neuroscience Online Courses Opera Philosophy Photography Physics Podcasts Poetry Politics Pretty Much Pop Productivity Psychology Radio Random Religion Sci Fi Science Software Sports Stanford Technology TED Talks Television Theatre Travel Twitter UC Berkeley Uncategorized Video – Arts & Culture Video – Politics/Society Video – Science Video Games Web/Tech Wikipedia Writing Yale YouTube Great Lectures Michel Foucault Sun Ra at UC Berkeley Richard Feynman Joseph Campbell Carl Sagan Margaret Atwood Jorge Luis Borges Leonard Bernstein Richard Dawkins Buckminster Fuller Walter Kaufmann on Existentialism Jacques Lacan Roland Barthes Nobel Lectures by Writers Toni Morrison Bertrand Russell Oxford Philosophy Lectures FREE UPDATES! GET OUR DAILY EMAIL Get the best cultural and educational resources on the web curated for you in a daily email. We never spam. Unsubscribe at any time. FOLLOW ON SOCIAL MEDIA About Us Open Culture scours the web for the best educational media. We find the free courses and audio books you need, the language lessons & educational videos you want, and plenty of enlightenment in between. Advertise With Us Great Recordings T.S. Eliot Reads Waste Land Sylvia Plath - Ariel Joyce Reads Ulysses Joyce - Finnegans Wake Patti Smith Reads Virginia Woolf Albert Einstein Charles Bukowski Bill Murray Hemingway Fitzgerald Reads Shakespeare William Faulkner Flannery O'Connor Tolkien - The Hobbit Allen Ginsberg - Howl W.B Yeats Ezra Pound Dylan Thomas Anne Sexton John Cheever David Foster Wallace Book Lists By Neil deGrasse Tyson Ernest Hemingway F. Scott Fitzgerald Allen Ginsberg Patti Smith Brian Eno Henry Miller Christopher Hitchens Joseph Brodsky W.H. 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All rights reserved. Home About Us Advertise with Us Copyright Policy Privacy Policy Terms of Use Bio Audio Books Online Courses MOOCs Movies Languages Textbooks eBooks Open Culture was founded by Dan How did Faulkner pull it off?” is a question many a fledgling writer has asked themselves while struggling through a period of apprenticeship like that novelist John Barth describes in his 1999 talk “My Faulkner.” Barth “reorchestrated” his literary heroes, he says, “in search of my writerly self… downloading my innumerable predecessors as only an insatiable green apprentice can.” Surely a great many writers can relate when Barth says, “it was Faulkner at his most involuted and incantatory who most enchanted me.” For many a writer, the Faulknerian sentence is an irresistible labyrinth. His syntax has a way of weaving itself into the unconscious, emerging as fair to middling imitation. While studying at Johns Hopkins University, Barth found himself writing about his native Eastern Shore Maryland in a pastiche style of “middle Faulkner and late Joyce.” He may have won some praise from a visiting young William Styron, “but the finished opus didn’t fly—for one thing, because Faulkner intimately knew his Snopses and Compsons and Sartorises, as I did not know my made-up denizens of the Maryland marsh.” The advice to write only what you know may not be worth much as a universal commandment. But studying the way that Faulkner wrote when he turned to the subjects he knew best provides an object lesson on how powerful a literary resource intimacy can be. Not only does Faulkner’s deep affiliation with his characters’ inner lives elevate his portraits far above the level of local color or regionalist curiosity, but it animates his sentences, makes them constantly move and breathe. No matter how long and twisted they get, they do not wilt, wither, or drag; they run river-like, turning around in asides, outraging themselves and doubling and tripling back. Faulkner’s intimacy is not earnestness, it is the uncanny feeling of a raw encounter with a nerve center lighting up with information, all of it seemingly critically important. It is the extraordinary sensory quality of his prose that enabled Faulkner to get away with writing the longest sentence in literature, at least according to the 1983 Guinness Book of World Records, a passage from Absalom, Absalom! consisting of ,288 words and who knows how many different kinds of clauses. There are now longer sentences in English writing. Jonathan Coe’s The Rotter’s Club ends with a -page long whopper with ,955 words in it. Entire novels hundreds of pages long have been written in one sentence in other languages. All of Faulkner’s modernist contemporaries, including of course Joyce, Wolff, and Beckett, mastered the use of run-ons, to different effect. But, for a time, Faulkner took the run-on as far as it could go. He may have had no intention of inspiring postmodern fiction, but one of its best-known novelists, Barth, only found his voice by first writing a “heavily Faulknerian marsh-opera.” Many hundreds of experimental writers have had almost identical experiences trying to exorcise the Oxford, Mississippi modernist’s voice from their prose. Read that onetime longest sentence in literature, all ,288 words of it, below. Just exactly like Father if Father had known as much about it the night before I went out there as he did the day after I came back thinking Mad impotent old man who realized at last that there must be some limit even to the capabilities of a demon for doing harm, who must have seen his situation as that of the show girl, the pony, who realizes that the principal tune she prances to comes not from horn and fiddle and drum but from a clock and calendar, must have seen himself as the old wornout cannon which realizes that it can deliver just one more fierce shot and crumble to dust in its own furious blast and recoil, who looked about upon the scene which was still within his scope and compass and saw son gone, vanished, more insuperable to him now than if the son were dead since now (if the son still lived) his name would be different and those to call him by it strangers and whatever dragon’s outcropping of Sutpen blood the son might sow on the body of whatever strange woman would therefore carry on the tradition, accomplish the hereditary evil and harm under another name and upon and among people who will never have heard the right one; daughter doomed to spinsterhood who had chosen spinsterhood already before there was anyone named Charles Bon since the aunt who came to succor her in bereavement and sorrow found neither but instead that calm absolutely impenetrable face between a homespun dress and sunbonnet seen before a closed door and again in a cloudy swirl of chickens while Jones was building the coffin and which she wore during the next year while the aunt lived there and the three women wove their own garments and raised their own food and cut the wood they cooked it with (excusing what help they had from Jones who lived with his granddaughter in the abandoned fishing camp with its collapsing roof and rotting porch against which the rusty scythe which Sutpen was to lend him, make him borrow to cut away the weeds from the door-and at last forced him to use though not to cut weeds, at least not vegetable weeds -would lean for two years) and wore still after the aunt’s indignation had swept her back to town to live on stolen garden truck and out o f anonymous baskets left on her front steps at night, the three of them, the two daughters negro and white and the aunt twelve miles away watching from her distance as the two daughters watched from theirs the old demon, the ancient varicose and despairing Faustus fling his final main now with the Creditor’s hand already on his shoulder, running his little country store now for his bread and meat, haggling tediously over nickels and dimes with rapacious and poverty-stricken whites and negroes, who at one time could have galloped for ten miles in any direction without crossing his own boundary, using out of his meagre stock the cheap ribbons and beads and the stale violently-colored candy with which even an old man can seduce a fifteen-year-old country girl, to ruin the granddaughter o f his partner, this Jones-this gangling malaria-ridden white man whom he had given permission fourteen years ago to squat in the abandoned fishing camp with the year-old grandchild-Jones, partner porter and clerk who at the demon’s command removed with his own hand (and maybe delivered too) from the showcase the candy beads and ribbons, measured the very cloth from which Judith (who had not been bereaved and did not mourn) helped the granddaughter to fashion a dress to walk past the lounging men in, the side-looking and the tongues, until her increasing belly taught her embarrassment-or perhaps fear;-Jones who before ’ had not even been allowed to approach the front of the house and who during the next four years got no nearer than the kitchen door and that only when he brought the game and fish and vegetables on which the seducer-to-be’s wife and daughter (and Clytie too, the one remaining servant, negro, the one who would forbid him to pass the kitchen door with what he brought) depended on to keep life in them, but who now entered the house itself on the (quite frequent now) afternoons when the demon would suddenly curse the store empty of customers and lock the door and repair to the rear and in the same tone in which he used to address his orderly or even his house servants when he had them (and in which he doubtless ordered Jones to fetch from the showcase the ribbons and beads and candy) direct Jones to fetch the jug, the two of them (and Jones even sitting now who in the old days, the old dead Sunday afternoons of monotonous peace which they spent beneath the scuppernong arbor in the back yard, the demon lying in the hammock while Jones squatted against a post, rising from time to time to pour for the demon from the demijohn and the bucket of spring water which he had fetched from the spring more than a mile away then squatting again, chortling and chuckling and saying `Sho, Mister Tawm’ each time the demon paused)-the two of them drinking turn and turn about from the jug and the demon not lying down now nor even sitting but reaching after the third or second drink that old man’s state of impotent and furious undefeat in which he would rise, swaying and plunging and shouting for his horse and pistols to ride single-handed into Washington and shoot Lincoln (a year or so too late here) and Sherman both, shouting, ‘Kill them! Shoot them down like the dogs they are!’ and Jones: ‘Sho, Kernel; sho now’ and catching him as he fell and commandeering the first passing wagon to take him to the house and carry him up the front steps and through the paintless formal door beneath its fanlight imported pane by pane from Europe which Judith held open for him to enter with no change, no alteration in that calm frozen face which she had worn for four years now, and on up the stairs and into the bedroom and put him to bed like a baby and then lie down himself on the floor beside the bed though not to sleep since before dawn the man on the bed would stir and groan and Jones would say, ‘flyer I am, Kernel. Hit’s all right. They aint whupped us yit, air they?’ this Jones who after the demon rode away with the regiment when the granddaughter was only eight years old would tell people that he ‘was lookin after Major’s place and niggers’ even before they had time to ask him why he was not with the troops and perhaps in time came to believe the lie himself, who was among the first to greet the demon when he returned, to meet him at the gate and say, ‘Well, Kernel, they kilt us but they aint whupped us yit, air they?’ who even worked, labored, sweat at the demon’s behest during that first furious period while the demon believed he could restore by sheer indomitable willing the Sutpen’s Hundred which he remembered and had lost, labored with no hope of pay or reward who must have seen long before the demon did (or would admit it) that the task was hopeless-blind Jones who apparently saw still in that furious lecherous wreck the old fine figure of the man who once galloped on the black thoroughbred about that domain two boundaries of which the eye could not see from any point. Related Content: Wonderfully Long Literary Sentences by Samuel Beckett, Virginia Woolf, F. Scott Fitzgerald & Other Masters of the Run-On Seven Tips From William Faulkner on How to Write Fiction William Faulkner Reads from As I Lay Dying Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness .k SHARES Facebook Twitter Reddit by Josh Jones | Permalink | Comments () | Support Open Culture We’re hoping to rely on our loyal readers rather than erratic ads. To support Open Culture’s continued operation, please consider making a donation. We thank you! Comments () You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed. Random1785 says: September , 2019 at : pm Imagine reading a novel with a sentence that was 000 words long! Reply ranouttanameideasandimspendingtoomuchtimethinkingofthem says: November , 2019 at : pm this is absurd. imagine reading this book and being like “jeez this sentence is so long” Reply mikeyliam426@icloud.com says: April , 2020 at : pm Ya know ya got ya ya girl ya ya know ya ya boy you got caught with them and then ya got a robot in the car with a car in your head that was the best dog ever and you can call me and call him when I wanna is it time I get off work I will see if I gotta I wanna is a time I got a ride truck truck ride and iiiuuyr Reply Happy says: April , 2020 at :08 pm How did you do that. the longest thing that I have ever wrote was a 600 word paragraph and I just wrote that. Reply helothereboi says: June , 2020 at : am I think this is so cool that he spent this time on it but who would really read this all Reply Caileb says: June , 2020 at :08 pm omg i have to read this about a week and im done and i just want to say this have made my day Reply arkin says: June , 2020 at :02 pm i have wrote a story which has 12083 words in it. i broke the world record. but they did not give the award because i was a kid :C Reply Judith says: August , 2020 at :05 pm Read this in an hour easily Reply ME says: September , 2020 at : am hi! Reply Jesse Dosch says: November , 2020 at : am I won yay Reply Jesse Dosch says: November , 2020 at : am @arkin “It is supposedly the world’s longest published novel in English at . million words. If you have some extra time, you can read it at marienbadmylove.com. . A la recherche du temps perdu by Marcel Proust.” Reply Jesse Dosch says: November , 2020 at : am @arkin “It is supposedly the world’s longest published novel in English at . million words. If you have some extra time, you can read it at marienbadmylove.com. . A la recherche du temps perdu by Marcel Proust.” Reply Jesse Dosch says: November , 2020 at : am I got a sentence that was 5639 words long Reply this guy says: November , 2020 at : am i just looked it up so can can copy and paste it on my school chat for fun not to read Reply Benjamin says: December , 2020 at : am I just wanted to say, i really like cheese, and…i think…i think my teacher is mad at me sry wait…shes mad because i was asking my other teacher questions about work online… hmmm….my teacher sure is a ##### ass feminist… Reply yurrr says: December , 2020 at : am shutcho pickel chin as up Reply austin says: January , 2021 at :05 pm i just wrote a sentence with ,289 words so ha Reply Leave a Reply NAME (REQUIRED) EMAIL (REQUIRED) MESSAGE Essentials ,500 Free Online Courses 1000+ MOOCs ,150 Free Movies 700 Free Audio Books 150+ Best Podcasts 800 Free eBooks 200 Free Textbooks 300 Free Language Lessons 150 Free Business Courses Free K- Education Get Our Daily Email Support Us We're hoping to rely on loyal readers, rather than erratic ads. 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All rights reserved. Home About Us Advertise with Us Copyright Policy Privacy Policy Terms of Use Bio Audio Books Online Courses MOOCs Movies Languages Textbooks eBooks Open Culture was founded by Dan How did Faulkner pull it off?” is a question many a fledgling writer has asked themselves while struggling through a period of apprenticeship like that novelist John Barth describes in his 1999 talk “My Faulkner.” Barth “reorchestrated” his literary heroes, he says, “in search of my writerly self… downloading my innumerable predecessors as only an insatiable green apprentice can.” Surely a great many writers can relate when Barth says, “it was Faulkner at his most involuted and incantatory who most enchanted me.” For many a writer, the Faulknerian sentence is an irresistible labyrinth. His syntax has a way of weaving itself into the unconscious, emerging as fair to middling imitation. While studying at Johns Hopkins University, Barth found himself writing about his native Eastern Shore Maryland in a pastiche style of “middle Faulkner and late Joyce.” He may have won some praise from a visiting young William Styron, “but the finished opus didn’t fly—for one thing, because Faulkner intimately knew his Snopses and Compsons and Sartorises, as I did not know my made-up denizens of the Maryland marsh.” The advice to write only what you know may not be worth much as a universal commandment. But studying the way that Faulkner wrote when he turned to the subjects he knew best provides an object lesson on how powerful a literary resource intimacy can be. Not only does Faulkner’s deep affiliation with his characters’ inner lives elevate his portraits far above the level of local color or regionalist curiosity, but it animates his sentences, makes them constantly move and breathe. No matter how long and twisted they get, they do not wilt, wither, or drag; they run river-like, turning around in asides, outraging themselves and doubling and tripling back. Faulkner’s intimacy is not earnestness, it is the uncanny feeling of a raw encounter with a nerve center lighting up with information, all of it seemingly critically important. It is the extraordinary sensory quality of his prose that enabled Faulkner to get away with writing the longest sentence in literature, at least according to the 1983 Guinness Book of World Records, a passage from Absalom, Absalom! consisting of ,288 words and who knows how many different kinds of clauses. There are now longer sentences in English writing. Jonathan Coe’s The Rotter’s Club ends with a -page long whopper with ,955 words in it. Entire novels hundreds of pages long have been written in one sentence in other languages. All of Faulkner’s modernist contemporaries, including of course Joyce, Wolff, and Beckett, mastered the use of run-ons, to different effect. But, for a time, Faulkner took the run-on as far as it could go. He may have had no intention of inspiring postmodern fiction, but one of its best-known novelists, Barth, only found his voice by first writing a “heavily Faulknerian marsh-opera.” Many hundreds of experimental writers have had almost identical experiences trying to exorcise the Oxford, Mississippi modernist’s voice from their prose. Read that onetime longest sentence in literature, all ,288 words of it, below. Just exactly like Father if Father had known as much about it the night before I went out there as he did the day after I came back thinking Mad impotent old man who realized at last that there must be some limit even to the capabilities of a demon for doing harm, who must have seen his situation as that of the show girl, the pony, who realizes that the principal tune she prances to comes not from horn and fiddle and drum but from a clock and calendar, must have seen himself as the old wornout cannon which realizes that it can deliver just one more fierce shot and crumble to dust in its own furious blast and recoil, who looked about upon the scene which was still within his scope and compass and saw son gone, vanished, more insuperable to him now than if the son were dead since now (if the son still lived) his name would be different and those to call him by it strangers and whatever dragon’s outcropping of Sutpen blood the son might sow on the body of whatever strange woman would therefore carry on the tradition, accomplish the hereditary evil and harm under another name and upon and among people who will never have heard the right one; daughter doomed to spinsterhood who had chosen spinsterhood already before there was anyone named Charles Bon since the aunt who came to succor her in bereavement and sorrow found neither but instead that calm absolutely impenetrable face between a homespun dress and sunbonnet seen before a closed door and again in a cloudy swirl of chickens while Jones was building the coffin and which she wore during the next year while the aunt lived there and the three women wove their own garments and raised their own food and cut the wood they cooked it with (excusing what help they had from Jones who lived with his granddaughter in the abandoned fishing camp with its collapsing roof and rotting porch against which the rusty scythe which Sutpen was to lend him, make him borrow to cut away the weeds from the door-and at last forced him to use though not to cut weeds, at least not vegetable weeds -would lean for two years) and wore still after the aunt’s indignation had swept her back to town to live on stolen garden truck and out o f anonymous baskets left on her front steps at night, the three of them, the two daughters negro and white and the aunt twelve miles away watching from her distance as the two daughters watched from theirs the old demon, the ancient varicose and despairing Faustus fling his final main now with the Creditor’s hand already on his shoulder, running his little country store now for his bread and meat, haggling tediously over nickels and dimes with rapacious and poverty-stricken whites and negroes, who at one time could have galloped for ten miles in any direction without crossing his own boundary, using out of his meagre stock the cheap ribbons and beads and the stale violently-colored candy with which even an old man can seduce a fifteen-year-old country girl, to ruin the granddaughter o f his partner, this Jones-this gangling malaria-ridden white man whom he had given permission fourteen years ago to squat in the abandoned fishing camp with the year-old grandchild-Jones, partner porter and clerk who at the demon’s command removed with his own hand (and maybe delivered too) from the showcase the candy beads and ribbons, measured the very cloth from which Judith (who had not been bereaved and did not mourn) helped the granddaughter to fashion a dress to walk past the lounging men in, the side-looking and the tongues, until her increasing belly taught her embarrassment-or perhaps fear;-Jones who before ’ had not even been allowed to approach the front of the house and who during the next four years got no nearer than the kitchen door and that only when he brought the game and fish and vegetables on which the seducer-to-be’s wife and daughter (and Clytie too, the one remaining servant, negro, the one who would forbid him to pass the kitchen door with what he brought) depended on to keep life in them, but who now entered the house itself on the (quite frequent now) afternoons when the demon would suddenly curse the store empty of customers and lock the door and repair to the rear and in the same tone in which he used to address his orderly or even his house servants when he had them (and in which he doubtless ordered Jones to fetch from the showcase the ribbons and beads and candy) direct Jones to fetch the jug, the two of them (and Jones even sitting now who in the old days, the old dead Sunday afternoons of monotonous peace which they spent beneath the scuppernong arbor in the back yard, the demon lying in the hammock while Jones squatted against a post, rising from time to time to pour for the demon from the demijohn and the bucket of spring water which he had fetched from the spring more than a mile away then squatting again, chortling and chuckling and saying `Sho, Mister Tawm’ each time the demon paused)-the two of them drinking turn and turn about from the jug and the demon not lying down now nor even sitting but reaching after the third or second drink that old man’s state of impotent and furious undefeat in which he would rise, swaying and plunging and shouting for his horse and pistols to ride single-handed into Washington and shoot Lincoln (a year or so too late here) and Sherman both, shouting, ‘Kill them! Shoot them down like the dogs they are!’ and Jones: ‘Sho, Kernel; sho now’ and catching him as he fell and commandeering the first passing wagon to take him to the house and carry him up the front steps and through the paintless formal door beneath its fanlight imported pane by pane from Europe which Judith held open for him to enter with no change, no alteration in that calm frozen face which she had worn for four years now, and on up the stairs and into the bedroom and put him to bed like a baby and then lie down himself on the floor beside the bed though not to sleep since before dawn the man on the bed would stir and groan and Jones would say, ‘flyer I am, Kernel. Hit’s all right. They aint whupped us yit, air they?’ this Jones who after the demon rode away with the regiment when the granddaughter was only eight years old would tell people that he ‘was lookin after Major’s place and niggers’ even before they had time to ask him why he was not with the troops and perhaps in time came to believe the lie himself, who was among the first to greet the demon when he returned, to meet him at the gate and say, ‘Well, Kernel, they kilt us but they aint whupped us yit, air they?’ who even worked, labored, sweat at the demon’s behest during that first furious period while the demon believed he could restore by sheer indomitable willing the Sutpen’s Hundred which he remembered and had lost, labored with no hope of pay or reward who must have seen long before the demon did (or would admit it) that the task was hopeless-blind Jones who apparently saw still in that furious lecherous wreck the old fine figure of the man who once galloped on the black thoroughbred about that domain two boundaries of which the eye could not see from any point. Related Content: Wonderfully Long Literary Sentences by Samuel Beckett, Virginia Woolf, F. Scott Fitzgerald & Other Masters of the Run-On Seven Tips From William Faulkner on How to Write Fiction William Faulkner Reads from As I Lay Dying Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness .k SHARES Facebook Twitter Reddit by Josh Jones | Permalink | Comments () | Support Open Culture We’re hoping to rely on our loyal readers rather than erratic ads. To support Open Culture’s continued operation, please consider making a donation. We thank you! Comments () You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed. Random1785 says: September , 2019 at : pm Imagine reading a novel with a sentence that was 000 words long! Reply ranouttanameideasandimspendingtoomuchtimethinkingofthem says: November , 2019 at : pm this is absurd. imagine reading this book and being like “jeez this sentence is so long” Reply mikeyliam426@icloud.com says: April , 2020 at : pm Ya know ya got ya ya girl ya ya know ya ya boy you got caught with them and then ya got a robot in the car with a car in your head that was the best dog ever and you can call me and call him when I wanna is it time I get off work I will see if I gotta I wanna is a time I got a ride truck truck ride and iiiuuyr Reply Happy says: April , 2020 at :08 pm How did you do that. the longest thing that I have ever wrote was a 600 word paragraph and I just wrote that. Reply helothereboi says: June , 2020 at : am I think this is so cool that he spent this time on it but who would really read this all Reply Caileb says: June , 2020 at :08 pm omg i have to read this about a week and im done and i just want to say this have made my day Reply arkin says: June , 2020 at :02 pm i have wrote a story which has 12083 words in it. i broke the world record. but they did not give the award because i was a kid :C Reply Judith says: August , 2020 at :05 pm Read this in an hour easily Reply ME says: September , 2020 at : am hi! Reply Jesse Dosch says: November , 2020 at : am I won yay Reply Jesse Dosch says: November , 2020 at : am @arkin “It is supposedly the world’s longest published novel in English at . million words. If you have some extra time, you can read it at marienbadmylove.com. . A la recherche du temps perdu by Marcel Proust.” Reply Jesse Dosch says: November , 2020 at : am @arkin “It is supposedly the world’s longest published novel in English at . million words. If you have some extra time, you can read it at marienbadmylove.com. . A la recherche du temps perdu by Marcel Proust.” Reply Jesse Dosch says: November , 2020 at : am I got a sentence that was 5639 words long Reply this guy says: November , 2020 at : am i just looked it up so can can copy and paste it on my school chat for fun not to read Reply Benjamin says: December , 2020 at : am I just wanted to say, i really like cheese, and…i think…i think my teacher is mad at me sry wait…shes mad because i was asking my other teacher questions about work online… hmmm….my teacher sure is a ##### ass feminist… Reply yurrr says: December , 2020 at : am shutcho pickel chin as up Reply austin says: January , 2021 at :05 pm i just wrote a sentence with ,289 words so ha Reply Leave a Reply NAME (REQUIRED) EMAIL (REQUIRED) MESSAGE Essentials ,500 Free Online Courses 1000+ MOOCs ,150 Free Movies 700 Free Audio Books 150+ Best Podcasts 800 Free eBooks 200 Free Textbooks 300 Free Language Lessons 150 Free Business Courses Free K- Education Get Our Daily Email Support Us We're hoping to rely on loyal readers, rather than erratic ads. Click the Donate button and support Open Culture. We thank you! Free Courses Art & Art History Astronomy Biology Business Chemistry Classics/Ancient World Computer Science Data Science Economics Engineering Environment History Literature Math Philosophy Physics Political Science Psychology Religion Writing & Journalism All 1500 Free Courses 1000+ MOOCs & Certificate Courses Free Movies 1150 Free Movies Online Free Film Noir Silent Films Documentaries Martial Arts/Kung Fu Animations Free Hitchcock Films Free Charlie Chaplin Free John Wayne Movies Free Tarkovsky Films Free Dziga Vertov Free Oscar Winners Free Language Lessons Arabic Chinese English French German Italian Russian Spanish All Languages Free eBooks 700 Free eBooks Free Philosophy eBooks The Harvard Classics Philip K. 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All rights reserved. Home About Us Advertise with Us Copyright Policy Privacy Policy Terms of Use Bio Audio Books Online Courses MOOCs Movies Languages Textbooks eBooks Open Culture was founded by Dan How did Faulkner pull it off?” is a question many a fledgling writer has asked themselves while struggling through a period of apprenticeship like that novelist John Barth describes in his 1999 talk “My Faulkner.” Barth “reorchestrated” his literary heroes, he says, “in search of my writerly self… downloading my innumerable predecessors as only an insatiable green apprentice can.” Surely a great many writers can relate when Barth says, “it was Faulkner at his most involuted and incantatory who most enchanted me.” For many a writer, the Faulknerian sentence is an irresistible labyrinth. His syntax has a way of weaving itself into the unconscious, emerging as fair to middling imitation. While studying at Johns Hopkins University, Barth found himself writing about his native Eastern Shore Maryland in a pastiche style of “middle Faulkner and late Joyce.” He may have won some praise from a visiting young William Styron, “but the finished opus didn’t fly—for one thing, because Faulkner intimately knew his Snopses and Compsons and Sartorises, as I did not know my made-up denizens of the Maryland marsh.” The advice to write only what you know may not be worth much as a universal commandment. But studying the way that Faulkner wrote when he turned to the subjects he knew best provides an object lesson on how powerful a literary resource intimacy can be. Not only does Faulkner’s deep affiliation with his characters’ inner lives elevate his portraits far above the level of local color or regionalist curiosity, but it animates his sentences, makes them constantly move and breathe. No matter how long and twisted they get, they do not wilt, wither, or drag; they run river-like, turning around in asides, outraging themselves and doubling and tripling back. Faulkner’s intimacy is not earnestness, it is the uncanny feeling of a raw encounter with a nerve center lighting up with information, all of it seemingly critically important. It is the extraordinary sensory quality of his prose that enabled Faulkner to get away with writing the longest sentence in literature, at least according to the 1983 Guinness Book of World Records, a passage from Absalom, Absalom! consisting of ,288 words and who knows how many different kinds of clauses. There are now longer sentences in English writing. Jonathan Coe’s The Rotter’s Club ends with a -page long whopper with ,955 words in it. Entire novels hundreds of pages long have been written in one sentence in other languages. All of Faulkner’s modernist contemporaries, including of course Joyce, Wolff, and Beckett, mastered the use of run-ons, to different effect. But, for a time, Faulkner took the run-on as far as it could go. He may have had no intention of inspiring postmodern fiction, but one of its best-known novelists, Barth, only found his voice by first writing a “heavily Faulknerian marsh-opera.” Many hundreds of experimental writers have had almost identical experiences trying to exorcise the Oxford, Mississippi modernist’s voice from their prose. Read that onetime longest sentence in literature, all ,288 words of it, below. Just exactly like Father if Father had known as much about it the night before I went out there as he did the day after I came back thinking Mad impotent old man who realized at last that there must be some limit even to the capabilities of a demon for doing harm, who must have seen his situation as that of the show girl, the pony, who realizes that the principal tune she prances to comes not from horn and fiddle and drum but from a clock and calendar, must have seen himself as the old wornout cannon which realizes that it can deliver just one more fierce shot and crumble to dust in its own furious blast and recoil, who looked about upon the scene which was still within his scope and compass and saw son gone, vanished, more insuperable to him now than if the son were dead since now (if the son still lived) his name would be different and those to call him by it strangers and whatever dragon’s outcropping of Sutpen blood the son might sow on the body of whatever strange woman would therefore carry on the tradition, accomplish the hereditary evil and harm under another name and upon and among people who will never have heard the right one; daughter doomed to spinsterhood who had chosen spinsterhood already before there was anyone named Charles Bon since the aunt who came to succor her in bereavement and sorrow found neither but instead that calm absolutely impenetrable face between a homespun dress and sunbonnet seen before a closed door and again in a cloudy swirl of chickens while Jones was building the coffin and which she wore during the next year while the aunt lived there and the three women wove their own garments and raised their own food and cut the wood they cooked it with (excusing what help they had from Jones who lived with his granddaughter in the abandoned fishing camp with its collapsing roof and rotting porch against which the rusty scythe which Sutpen was to lend him, make him borrow to cut away the weeds from the door-and at last forced him to use though not to cut weeds, at least not vegetable weeds -would lean for two years) and wore still after the aunt’s indignation had swept her back to town to live on stolen garden truck and out o f anonymous baskets left on her front steps at night, the three of them, the two daughters negro and white and the aunt twelve miles away watching from her distance as the two daughters watched from theirs the old demon, the ancient varicose and despairing Faustus fling his final main now with the Creditor’s hand already on his shoulder, running his little country store now for his bread and meat, haggling tediously over nickels and dimes with rapacious and poverty-stricken whites and negroes, who at one time could have galloped for ten miles in any direction without crossing his own boundary, using out of his meagre stock the cheap ribbons and beads and the stale violently-colored candy with which even an old man can seduce a fifteen-year-old country girl, to ruin the granddaughter o f his partner, this Jones-this gangling malaria-ridden white man whom he had given permission fourteen years ago to squat in the abandoned fishing camp with the year-old grandchild-Jones, partner porter and clerk who at the demon’s command removed with his own hand (and maybe delivered too) from the showcase the candy beads and ribbons, measured the very cloth from which Judith (who had not been bereaved and did not mourn) helped the granddaughter to fashion a dress to walk past the lounging men in, the side-looking and the tongues, until her increasing belly taught her embarrassment-or perhaps fear;-Jones who before ’ had not even been allowed to approach the front of the house and who during the next four years got no nearer than the kitchen door and that only when he brought the game and fish and vegetables on which the seducer-to-be’s wife and daughter (and Clytie too, the one remaining servant, negro, the one who would forbid him to pass the kitchen door with what he brought) depended on to keep life in them, but who now entered the house itself on the (quite frequent now) afternoons when the demon would suddenly curse the store empty of customers and lock the door and repair to the rear and in the same tone in which he used to address his orderly or even his house servants when he had them (and in which he doubtless ordered Jones to fetch from the showcase the ribbons and beads and candy) direct Jones to fetch the jug, the two of them (and Jones even sitting now who in the old days, the old dead Sunday afternoons of monotonous peace which they spent beneath the scuppernong arbor in the back yard, the demon lying in the hammock while Jones squatted against a post, rising from time to time to pour for the demon from the demijohn and the bucket of spring water which he had fetched from the spring more than a mile away then squatting again, chortling and chuckling and saying `Sho, Mister Tawm’ each time the demon paused)-the two of them drinking turn and turn about from the jug and the demon not lying down now nor even sitting but reaching after the third or second drink that old man’s state of impotent and furious undefeat in which he would rise, swaying and plunging and shouting for his horse and pistols to ride single-handed into Washington and shoot Lincoln (a year or so too late here) and Sherman both, shouting, ‘Kill them! Shoot them down like the dogs they are!’ and Jones: ‘Sho, Kernel; sho now’ and catching him as he fell and commandeering the first passing wagon to take him to the house and carry him up the front steps and through the paintless formal door beneath its fanlight imported pane by pane from Europe which Judith held open for him to enter with no change, no alteration in that calm frozen face which she had worn for four years now, and on up the stairs and into the bedroom and put him to bed like a baby and then lie down himself on the floor beside the bed though not to sleep since before dawn the man on the bed would stir and groan and Jones would say, ‘flyer I am, Kernel. Hit’s all right. They aint whupped us yit, air they?’ this Jones who after the demon rode away with the regiment when the granddaughter was only eight years old would tell people that he ‘was lookin after Major’s place and niggers’ even before they had time to ask him why he was not with the troops and perhaps in time came to believe the lie himself, who was among the first to greet the demon when he returned, to meet him at the gate and say, ‘Well, Kernel, they kilt us but they aint whupped us yit, air they?’ who even worked, labored, sweat at the demon’s behest during that first furious period while the demon believed he could restore by sheer indomitable willing the Sutpen’s Hundred which he remembered and had lost, labored with no hope of pay or reward who must have seen long before the demon did (or would admit it) that the task was hopeless-blind Jones who apparently saw still in that furious lecherous wreck the old fine figure of the man who once galloped on the black thoroughbred about that domain two boundaries of which the eye could not see from any point. Related Content: Wonderfully Long Literary Sentences by Samuel Beckett, Virginia Woolf, F. Scott Fitzgerald & Other Masters of the Run-On Seven Tips From William Faulkner on How to Write Fiction William Faulkner Reads from As I Lay Dying Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness .k SHARES Facebook Twitter Reddit by Josh Jones | Permalink | Comments () | Support Open Culture We’re hoping to rely on our loyal readers rather than erratic ads. To support Open Culture’s continued operation, please consider making a donation. We thank you! Comments () You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed. Random1785 says: September , 2019 at : pm Imagine reading a novel with a sentence that was 000 words long! Reply ranouttanameideasandimspendingtoomuchtimethinkingofthem says: November , 2019 at : pm this is absurd. imagine reading this book and being like “jeez this sentence is so long” Reply mikeyliam426@icloud.com says: April , 2020 at : pm Ya know ya got ya ya girl ya ya know ya ya boy you got caught with them and then ya got a robot in the car with a car in your head that was the best dog ever and you can call me and call him when I wanna is it time I get off work I will see if I gotta I wanna is a time I got a ride truck truck ride and iiiuuyr Reply Happy says: April , 2020 at :08 pm How did you do that. the longest thing that I have ever wrote was a 600 word paragraph and I just wrote that. Reply helothereboi says: June , 2020 at : am I think this is so cool that he spent this time on it but who would really read this all Reply Caileb says: June , 2020 at :08 pm omg i have to read this about a week and im done and i just want to say this have made my day Reply arkin says: June , 2020 at :02 pm i have wrote a story which has 12083 words in it. i broke the world record. but they did not give the award because i was a kid :C Reply Judith says: August , 2020 at :05 pm Read this in an hour easily Reply ME says: September , 2020 at : am hi! Reply Jesse Dosch says: November , 2020 at : am I won yay Reply Jesse Dosch says: November , 2020 at : am @arkin “It is supposedly the world’s longest published novel in English at . million words. If you have some extra time, you can read it at marienbadmylove.com. . A la recherche du temps perdu by Marcel Proust.” Reply Jesse Dosch says: November , 2020 at : am @arkin “It is supposedly the world’s longest published novel in English at . million words. If you have some extra time, you can read it at marienbadmylove.com. . A la recherche du temps perdu by Marcel Proust.” Reply Jesse Dosch says: November , 2020 at : am I got a sentence that was 5639 words long Reply this guy says: November , 2020 at : am i just looked it up so can can copy and paste it on my school chat for fun not to read Reply Benjamin says: December , 2020 at : am I just wanted to say, i really like cheese, and…i think…i think my teacher is mad at me sry wait…shes mad because i was asking my other teacher questions about work online… hmmm….my teacher sure is a ##### ass feminist… Reply yurrr says: December , 2020 at : am shutcho pickel chin as up Reply austin says: January , 2021 at :05 pm i just wrote a sentence with ,289 words so ha Reply Leave a Reply NAME (REQUIRED) EMAIL (REQUIRED) MESSAGE Essentials ,500 Free Online Courses 1000+ MOOCs ,150 Free Movies 700 Free Audio Books 150+ Best Podcasts 800 Free eBooks 200 Free Textbooks 300 Free Language Lessons 150 Free Business Courses Free K- Education Get Our Daily Email Support Us We're hoping to rely on loyal readers, rather than erratic ads. Click the Donate button and support Open Culture. We thank you! Free Courses Art & Art History Astronomy Biology Business Chemistry Classics/Ancient World Computer Science Data Science Economics Engineering Environment History Literature Math Philosophy Physics Political Science Psychology Religion Writing & Journalism All 1500 Free Courses 1000+ MOOCs & Certificate Courses Free Movies 1150 Free Movies Online Free Film Noir Silent Films Documentaries Martial Arts/Kung Fu Animations Free Hitchcock Films Free Charlie Chaplin Free John Wayne Movies Free Tarkovsky Films Free Dziga Vertov Free Oscar Winners Free Language Lessons Arabic Chinese English French German Italian Russian Spanish All Languages Free eBooks 700 Free eBooks Free Philosophy eBooks The Harvard Classics Philip K. Dick Stories Neil Gaiman Stories David Foster Wallace Stories & Essays Hemingway Stories Great Gatsby & Other Fitzgerald Novels HP Lovecraft Edgar Allan Poe Free Alice Munro Stories Jennifer Egan Stories George Saunders Stories Hunter S. 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GET OUR DAILY EMAIL Get the best cultural and educational resources on the web curated for you in a daily email. We never spam. Unsubscribe at any time. FOLLOW ON SOCIAL MEDIA About Us Open Culture scours the web for the best educational media. We find the free courses and audio books you need, the language lessons & educational videos you want, and plenty of enlightenment in between. Advertise With Us Great Recordings T.S. Eliot Reads Waste Land Sylvia Plath - Ariel Joyce Reads Ulysses Joyce - Finnegans Wake Patti Smith Reads Virginia Woolf Albert Einstein Charles Bukowski Bill Murray Hemingway Fitzgerald Reads Shakespeare William Faulkner Flannery O'Connor Tolkien - The Hobbit Allen Ginsberg - Howl W.B Yeats Ezra Pound Dylan Thomas Anne Sexton John Cheever David Foster Wallace Book Lists By Neil deGrasse Tyson Ernest Hemingway F. Scott Fitzgerald Allen Ginsberg Patti Smith Brian Eno Henry Miller Christopher Hitchens Joseph Brodsky W.H. 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All rights reserved. Home About Us Advertise with Us Copyright Policy Privacy Policy Terms of Use Bio Audio Books Online Courses MOOCs Movies Languages Textbooks eBooks Open Culture was founded by Dan How did Faulkner pull it off?” is a question many a fledgling writer has asked themselves while struggling through a period of apprenticeship like that novelist John Barth describes in his 1999 talk “My Faulkner.” Barth “reorchestrated” his literary heroes, he says, “in search of my writerly self… downloading my innumerable predecessors as only an insatiable green apprentice can.” Surely a great many writers can relate when Barth says, “it was Faulkner at his most involuted and incantatory who most enchanted me.” For many a writer, the Faulknerian sentence is an irresistible labyrinth. His syntax has a way of weaving itself into the unconscious, emerging as fair to middling imitation. While studying at Johns Hopkins University, Barth found himself writing about his native Eastern Shore Maryland in a pastiche style of “middle Faulkner and late Joyce.” He may have won some praise from a visiting young William Styron, “but the finished opus didn’t fly—for one thing, because Faulkner intimately knew his Snopses and Compsons and Sartorises, as I did not know my made-up denizens of the Maryland marsh.” The advice to write only what you know may not be worth much as a universal commandment. But studying the way that Faulkner wrote when he turned to the subjects he knew best provides an object lesson on how powerful a literary resource intimacy can be. Not only does Faulkner’s deep affiliation with his characters’ inner lives elevate his portraits far above the level of local color or regionalist curiosity, but it animates his sentences, makes them constantly move and breathe. No matter how long and twisted they get, they do not wilt, wither, or drag; they run river-like, turning around in asides, outraging themselves and doubling and tripling back. Faulkner’s intimacy is not earnestness, it is the uncanny feeling of a raw encounter with a nerve center lighting up with information, all of it seemingly critically important. It is the extraordinary sensory quality of his prose that enabled Faulkner to get away with writing the longest sentence in literature, at least according to the 1983 Guinness Book of World Records, a passage from Absalom, Absalom! consisting of ,288 words and who knows how many different kinds of clauses. There are now longer sentences in English writing. Jonathan Coe’s The Rotter’s Club ends with a -page long whopper with ,955 words in it. Entire novels hundreds of pages long have been written in one sentence in other languages. All of Faulkner’s modernist contemporaries, including of course Joyce, Wolff, and Beckett, mastered the use of run-ons, to different effect. But, for a time, Faulkner took the run-on as far as it could go. He may have had no intention of inspiring postmodern fiction, but one of its best-known novelists, Barth, only found his voice by first writing a “heavily Faulknerian marsh-opera.” Many hundreds of experimental writers have had almost identical experiences trying to exorcise the Oxford, Mississippi modernist’s voice from their prose. Read that onetime longest sentence in literature, all ,288 words of it, below. Just exactly like Father if Father had known as much about it the night before I went out there as he did the day after I came back thinking Mad impotent old man who realized at last that there must be some limit even to the capabilities of a demon for doing harm, who must have seen his situation as that of the show girl, the pony, who realizes that the principal tune she prances to comes not from horn and fiddle and drum but from a clock and calendar, must have seen himself as the old wornout cannon which realizes that it can deliver just one more fierce shot and crumble to dust in its own furious blast and recoil, who looked about upon the scene which was still within his scope and compass and saw son gone, vanished, more insuperable to him now than if the son were dead since now (if the son still lived) his name would be different and those to call him by it strangers and whatever dragon’s outcropping of Sutpen blood the son might sow on the body of whatever strange woman would therefore carry on the tradition, accomplish the hereditary evil and harm under another name and upon and among people who will never have heard the right one; daughter doomed to spinsterhood who had chosen spinsterhood already before there was anyone named Charles Bon since the aunt who came to succor her in bereavement and sorrow found neither but instead that calm absolutely impenetrable face between a homespun dress and sunbonnet seen before a closed door and again in a cloudy swirl of chickens while Jones was building the coffin and which she wore during the next year while the aunt lived there and the three women wove their own garments and raised their own food and cut the wood they cooked it with (excusing what help they had from Jones who lived with his granddaughter in the abandoned fishing camp with its collapsing roof and rotting porch against which the rusty scythe which Sutpen was to lend him, make him borrow to cut away the weeds from the door-and at last forced him to use though not to cut weeds, at least not vegetable weeds -would lean for two years) and wore still after the aunt’s indignation had swept her back to town to live on stolen garden truck and out o f anonymous baskets left on her front steps at night, the three of them, the two daughters negro and white and the aunt twelve miles away watching from her distance as the two daughters watched from theirs the old demon, the ancient varicose and despairing Faustus fling his final main now with the Creditor’s hand already on his shoulder, running his little country store now for his bread and meat, haggling tediously over nickels and dimes with rapacious and poverty-stricken whites and negroes, who at one time could have galloped for ten miles in any direction without crossing his own boundary, using out of his meagre stock the cheap ribbons and beads and the stale violently-colored candy with which even an old man can seduce a fifteen-year-old country girl, to ruin the granddaughter o f his partner, this Jones-this gangling malaria-ridden white man whom he had given permission fourteen years ago to squat in the abandoned fishing camp with the year-old grandchild-Jones, partner porter and clerk who at the demon’s command removed with his own hand (and maybe delivered too) from the showcase the candy beads and ribbons, measured the very cloth from which Judith (who had not been bereaved and did not mourn) helped the granddaughter to fashion a dress to walk past the lounging men in, the side-looking and the tongues, until her increasing belly taught her embarrassment-or perhaps fear;-Jones who before ’ had not even been allowed to approach the front of the house and who during the next four years got no nearer than the kitchen door and that only when he brought the game and fish and vegetables on which the seducer-to-be’s wife and daughter (and Clytie too, the one remaining servant, negro, the one who would forbid him to pass the kitchen door with what he brought) depended on to keep life in them, but who now entered the house itself on the (quite frequent now) afternoons when the demon would suddenly curse the store empty of customers and lock the door and repair to the rear and in the same tone in which he used to address his orderly or even his house servants when he had them (and in which he doubtless ordered Jones to fetch from the showcase the ribbons and beads and candy) direct Jones to fetch the jug, the two of them (and Jones even sitting now who in the old days, the old dead Sunday afternoons of monotonous peace which they spent beneath the scuppernong arbor in the back yard, the demon lying in the hammock while Jones squatted against a post, rising from time to time to pour for the demon from the demijohn and the bucket of spring water which he had fetched from the spring more than a mile away then squatting again, chortling and chuckling and saying `Sho, Mister Tawm’ each time the demon paused)-the two of them drinking turn and turn about from the jug and the demon not lying down now nor even sitting but reaching after the third or second drink that old man’s state of impotent and furious undefeat in which he would rise, swaying and plunging and shouting for his horse and pistols to ride single-handed into Washington and shoot Lincoln (a year or so too late here) and Sherman both, shouting, ‘Kill them! Shoot them down like the dogs they are!’ and Jones: ‘Sho, Kernel; sho now’ and catching him as he fell and commandeering the first passing wagon to take him to the house and carry him up the front steps and through the paintless formal door beneath its fanlight imported pane by pane from Europe which Judith held open for him to enter with no change, no alteration in that calm frozen face which she had worn for four years now, and on up the stairs and into the bedroom and put him to bed like a baby and then lie down himself on the floor beside the bed though not to sleep since before dawn the man on the bed would stir and groan and Jones would say, ‘flyer I am, Kernel. Hit’s all right. They aint whupped us yit, air they?’ this Jones who after the demon rode away with the regiment when the granddaughter was only eight years old would tell people that he ‘was lookin after Major’s place and niggers’ even before they had time to ask him why he was not with the troops and perhaps in time came to believe the lie himself, who was among the first to greet the demon when he returned, to meet him at the gate and say, ‘Well, Kernel, they kilt us but they aint whupped us yit, air they?’ who even worked, labored, sweat at the demon’s behest during that first furious period while the demon believed he could restore by sheer indomitable willing the Sutpen’s Hundred which he remembered and had lost, labored with no hope of pay or reward who must have seen long before the demon did (or would admit it) that the task was hopeless-blind Jones who apparently saw still in that furious lecherous wreck the old fine figure of the man who once galloped on the black thoroughbred about that domain two boundaries of which the eye could not see from any point. Related Content: Wonderfully Long Literary Sentences by Samuel Beckett, Virginia Woolf, F. Scott Fitzgerald & Other Masters of the Run-On Seven Tips From William Faulkner on How to Write Fiction William Faulkner Reads from As I Lay Dying Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness .k SHARES Facebook Twitter Reddit by Josh Jones | Permalink | Comments () | Support Open Culture We’re hoping to rely on our loyal readers rather than erratic ads. To support Open Culture’s continued operation, please consider making a donation. We thank you! Comments () You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed. Random1785 says: September , 2019 at : pm Imagine reading a novel with a sentence that was 000 words long! Reply ranouttanameideasandimspendingtoomuchtimethinkingofthem says: November , 2019 at : pm this is absurd. imagine reading this book and being like “jeez this sentence is so long” Reply mikeyliam426@icloud.com says: April , 2020 at : pm Ya know ya got ya ya girl ya ya know ya ya boy you got caught with them and then ya got a robot in the car with a car in your head that was the best dog ever and you can call me and call him when I wanna is it time I get off work I will see if I gotta I wanna is a time I got a ride truck truck ride and iiiuuyr Reply Happy says: April , 2020 at :08 pm How did you do that. the longest thing that I have ever wrote was a 600 word paragraph and I just wrote that. Reply helothereboi says: June , 2020 at : am I think this is so cool that he spent this time on it but who would really read this all Reply Caileb says: June , 2020 at :08 pm omg i have to read this about a week and im done and i just want to say this have made my day Reply arkin says: June , 2020 at :02 pm i have wrote a story which has 12083 words in it. i broke the world record. but they did not give the award because i was a kid :C Reply Judith says: August , 2020 at :05 pm Read this in an hour easily Reply ME says: September , 2020 at : am hi! Reply Jesse Dosch says: November , 2020 at : am I won yay Reply Jesse Dosch says: November , 2020 at : am @arkin “It is supposedly the world’s longest published novel in English at . million words. If you have some extra time, you can read it at marienbadmylove.com. . A la recherche du temps perdu by Marcel Proust.” Reply Jesse Dosch says: November , 2020 at : am @arkin “It is supposedly the world’s longest published novel in English at . million words. If you have some extra time, you can read it at marienbadmylove.com. . A la recherche du temps perdu by Marcel Proust.” Reply Jesse Dosch says: November , 2020 at : am I got a sentence that was 5639 words long Reply this guy says: November , 2020 at : am i just looked it up so can can copy and paste it on my school chat for fun not to read Reply Benjamin says: December , 2020 at : am I just wanted to say, i really like cheese, and…i think…i think my teacher is mad at me sry wait…shes mad because i was asking my other teacher questions about work online… hmmm….my teacher sure is a ##### ass feminist… Reply yurrr says: December , 2020 at : am shutcho pickel chin as up Reply austin says: January , 2021 at :05 pm i just wrote a sentence with ,289 words so ha Reply Leave a Reply NAME (REQUIRED) EMAIL (REQUIRED) MESSAGE Essentials ,500 Free Online Courses 1000+ MOOCs ,150 Free Movies 700 Free Audio Books 150+ Best Podcasts 800 Free eBooks 200 Free Textbooks 300 Free Language Lessons 150 Free Business Courses Free K- Education Get Our Daily Email Support Us We're hoping to rely on loyal readers, rather than erratic ads. 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All rights reserved. Home About Us Advertise with Us Copyright Policy Privacy Policy Terms of Use Bio Audio Books Online Courses MOOCs Movies Languages Textbooks eBooks Open Culture was founded by Dan Colman .