: The longest essay ever attempted as a single sitting writing stunt is another matter. In 2021, a performance artist in Berlin typed for 120 hours straight, producing a 540,000-word stream-of-consciousness “essay” on loneliness. It was never published or verified.
So if you need a one‑sentence takeaway: John Locke’s 1689 philosophical work, at ~360,000 words, is the longest single work still universally titled an “essay” by its author and literary history. worlds longest essay
The does not officially list “longest essay,” but in academic circles, the longest known undergraduate essay is one by a University of Bristol history student in 2012 who submitted a 112,000-word dissertation (roughly the length of a 350-page book). The tutor reportedly read it over a summer. : The longest essay ever attempted as a
If you want the : a French philosopher, Bernard-Henri Lévy , once wrote a 1,200-page essay on philosophy and war ( L’Esprit du judaïsme ), but again, publishers call it a book. So if you need a one‑sentence takeaway: John
For a single, continuous, non-fiction prose argument by one author, the record may go to by Richard Rhodes (c. 350,000 words) or The Gulag Archipelago by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (c. 500,000 words across three volumes). However, Solzhenitsyn called it a “literary investigation,” not an essay.