Somewhere out there sits a writer who has spent longer on their manuscript than most marriages last. Not longer than a mobile phone contract. Longer than an actual human relationship. They will tell you, with a perfectly straight face, that the book is “nearly there.” It has been nearly there since the Berlin Wall tumbled.
People assume novels arrive in a neat twelve-month fever of inspiration. Some do. Plenty crawl out over a span so long the author needs a fresh pair of reading glasses to finish the sentence they started. Here, for the comfort of anyone still fiddling with chapter three, are the great slow burners of literature… and what all that waiting actually bought them.
More than twenty years at the typewriter: Katherine Anne Porter
Porter began Ship of Fools in 1940. She meant it to be a novella. A quick thing. In and out before one season rolled into the next. It finally reached shelves in 1962, by which point the novella idea had swelled into a doorstop and Porter had spent two full decades circling the same voyage… a real crossing she had taken from Mexico to Europe back in 1931.
Her explanation for the delay had nothing to do with genius and everything to do with life intruding. Primarily, she had to earn a living, teaching and touring the country, forever trying to snatch minutes at her typewriter. Any writer with a day job will recognise Porter’s challenge. The book, when it finally landed, outsold every other American novel of 1962, and the film rights eventually sold for half a million dollars. More than twenty years. Worth the wait, then.
A quarter of a century for one book: Harold Brodkey
Brodkey laboured over The Runaway Soul for more than twenty-five years. Throughout the 1980s, the American literary world spoke of it in hushed, reverent tones as the next Great American Novel, a masterpiece forever on the cusp of arrival. Critics waited for it the way village residents wait for a bus.
It touched down at last in 1991, eight hundred pages of it, under a title the announcements had long promised as something else entirely. The reviews split straight down the middle. That, sadly, happens. You pour a quarter of a century into a thing, only for the world to shrug and reach for its coat.
Joyce, and the book almost nobody can read
James Joyce gave the best part of seventeen years to Finnegans Wake, a novel he wrote in a language he appears to have invented for the sole purpose of ensuring no one could accuse him of finishing early. It remains famously, gloriously unreadable… a book more admired than opened, sitting on shelves like a fire extinguisher. Reassuring to own. Never actually used.
The one that beat them all: Tolkien
If you want a true champion, it isn’t The Lord of the Rings, which Tolkien knocked out in a mere dozen years of writing squeezed around the day job. It’s The Silmarillion. He started sketching its myths during the First World War, scribbling the fall of a doomed city while on sick leave from the army in 1917. He kept revising, reworking, and quietly second-guessing it right up until the day he died in 1973. His son Christopher assembled the whole thing and published it in 1977. Sixty years from those first wartime pages to a book on a shelf, and the author never lived to hold it.
The sixty-year silence: Henry Roth
Then comes the saddest and strangest of the lot. Henry Roth published Call It Sleep in 1934 to modest notice, then fell into the longest bout of writer’s block in American literary history. Sixty years of it. He farmed waterfowl. He worked as a machinist. He let the decades roll by while critics slowly decided his forgotten debut had actually been a quiet masterpiece all along. In his late eighties, from a small home out west, he calmly announced he had written another novel. Four of them, in fact, all part of one long linked sequence. The silence had a shape after all.
The ten-year club, and why it barely counts
Set against Tolkien, a decade looks almost brisk. Victor Hugo carried the idea for Les Misérables around for the best part of seventeen years before it reached print in 1862. Margaret Mitchell spent roughly ten years on Gone with the Wind, having started it out of sheer boredom while laid up with a bad ankle. Junot Díaz took about ten years over The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, abandoned it entirely at one low point, then wandered back to it. Ten years for a novel sounds like a personal crisis. In this company, it’s practically a deadline met early.
What all that waiting is really about
Here’s the thing that the timelines never show you. Not one of these writers spent thirty years typing. They spent thirty years living, doubting, earning a wage, starting over, hating the draft, shoving it in a drawer and going for a very long walk. The book became the residue of all that. The slowness didn’t make the writer precious; it made the writer human, with a life that had other plans.
Which is oddly reassuring. If you have been telling people your novel is “coming along nicely” since roughly the last coronation, you sit in exceptional company. The muse does not carry a stopwatch. Some books simply take as long as they take, and one or two of the very best took longer than their authors had left. For the flip side of all this, and a more everyday answer, my piece on how long it actually takes to write a novel keeps its feet a little closer to the ground.
My own books tend to be about people who would give anything for the years back… which feels apt for a piece about years vanishing into a single project. In The ’86 Fix, a middle-aged man stuck in a loveless marriage and a dead-end job travels back to 1986 for one brief shot at fixing the life he wishes he’d led. In Lieu of You hands a husband on the brink of an ugly divorce the chance to return to 1996 and stop himself ever meeting his wife, with consequences he never sees coming. And The Last Stop Video Shop follows a man on the achy side of fifty who finds a VHS tape of a memory that never existed, and must decide whether to keep replaying his life or press eject. None of them took me sixty years. Give it time.
Frequently Asked Questions
What novel took the longest to write?
Among famous books, Tolkien’s The Silmarillion is one of the strongest contenders. He began sketching its myths in 1917, kept reworking them until his death in 1973, and his son Christopher edited and published the finished book in 1977, roughly sixty years after the first pages.
How long did Katherine Anne Porter take to write Ship of Fools?
Porter began Ship of Fools in 1940, intending a short novella, and did not publish it until 1962. That is more than twenty years, much of the delay caused by her need to teach and tour to earn a living rather than sit and write.
Did Tolkien finish The Silmarillion himself?
No. Tolkien worked on the material for decades but never completed a publishable version. After his death in 1973, his son Christopher Tolkien edited, partly wrote and assembled the book from his father’s drafts, publishing it in 1977.
Why do some novels take decades to write?
Rarely because the author is typing the whole time. Long gestations usually come from life intruding, day jobs and money worries, false starts, abandoned drafts, self-doubt, and books that quietly grow far more ambitious than the writer first planned.
What was Henry Roth’s writer’s block?
Roth published his acclaimed debut Call It Sleep in 1934, then wrote no further novel for around sixty years, often described as the longest writer’s block of any major American author. He finally published a new linked sequence of novels in his late eighties, shortly before his death in 1995.