The phrase “world’s longest essay” is tricky because it depends on how you define essay . If you mean a single, continuous piece of argumentative or exploratory prose by one author (not a novel, not a compiled reference work), the title arguably belongs to (1859) by Charles Darwin—but even that runs about 150,000 words, far shorter than many doctoral dissertations.
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. worlds longest essay
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. The phrase “world’s longest essay” is tricky because
: 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. The tutor reportedly read it over a summer
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.