Why are the great English writers so prolific?

Question

The great English writers are known for the breadth and width of their body of work. Why did so many great writers write so many books?

Answer 1

You may have long since lost interest in this question, but just in case you or anyone is still looking and interested, I'll throw another thought in there.

The word both answers are kind of circling around is fashion. Long novels were in fashion. Economic incentive is definitely a huge factor, and printing tech made it possible, and it's true not just in England (pick your top five English novelists and your top five Russian novelists, and put all their books into one pile each--which pile would you guess weighs more? Tough call...), but lit is just as driven by unpredictable fashion as clothing. And when one style gets popular, approximately the same percentage of the work will be great as in any other style.

But if you're asking about why they wrote so *many* things as well as so many *long* things, can I ask who or what you're comparing them to?

Dickens wrote 15 novels plus a bunch of stories, novellas, and articles; Balzac wrote 36+ novels, plus about the same number in total of novellas, short stories, and plays

Thomas Hardy wrote 16 novels, a bunch of short stories, and of course a ton of poetry; Isabel Allende wrote 20 novels plus nonfiction

The Bronte sisters between the three of them wrote about 9 novels and a volume's worth of poetry; Haruki Murakami has 14 novels and counting, plus short stories and several volumes of nonfiction

and so on...

Sure I'm stacking the deck with those examples, but what exactly is it that's making you think of the English as that much more prolific than any other culture's great authors?

Answer 2

I’m not sure I agree with the premise of the question. Writers are considered great in different genres and for different reasons. I, for instance, consider Stephen King a great short-story writer, but I don’t care for his novels. By any measure of “prolific,” though, his novels would far outweigh his short stories.

Serialization certainly gave writers like Dickens incentives to string out their tales, though they also ran the risk of readers losing interest. Other writers in the same period flourished through subscription publishing of shorter novels, or of nonfiction, or by promoting their books as touring lecturers and humorists (Mark Twain). Many of the “great” USAmerican writers were published in essays or short stories in magazines, and then sold longer books in the same or other categories. I have a whole shelf of books by the humorist and cartoonist James Thurber, about half of the volumes made up of material first published in The New Yorker in its heyday. Think of Steinbeck, Updike, or lately Margaret Atwood, who certainly qualifies as “prolific” and great. But Harper Lee, writer of one of the greatest American novels, published no other. And there’s an awful lot of pretty shabby writing in English that’s multiplied by forests worth of paper.

In the 19th and early 20th centuries, there was just a bigger market for the written word, before there was readily available passive entertainment by radio and then TV. When there’s a market, there will be people to feed it. Greatness is determined by other measures.

Answer 3

When you start looking at actual "long" novels, you'll discover that most of them were written in the 19th century. Technological developments and wider access to education made it possible to print and circulate journals. Authors were often paid by the length of their submissions (or installments), so they were motivated to write longer works. If readers were interested enough in the plot, they would be more likely to buy the next issue. Before the 19th century, the novel was not a dominant format, and in the 20th century thick journals gradually became less popular, so authors would rarely write novels of more than 200-300 pages. At present, the exception are fantasy novels, which are also often serialized. If you look beyond the British novel, a similar trend can be observed in the rest of Europe in the 19th century, as well.