Who’s the most prolific (that is, published) writer of all time? Go ahead, take a guess. And no, it certainly isn’t me.
All right, how many of you voted for Violet Crepuscular? And I’ll bet a lot of you thought it was John Creasy, but he was only No. 2, with some 600 novels published.
When I try to wrap my mind around those stats, it just won’t reach.
Actually, I was thinking of Anthony Trollope, who wrote 84 novels — and scores of short stories, plus an autobiography. But then again, I’m not that familiar with “popular” fiction. I’ve read some of Creasy’s detective novels, though. And by the way, I put “popular” in scare quotes because many of the 18th- and 19th-century novelists who are part of the “literary” canon now were widely (even wildly) popular in their day: Defoe, Radcliffe, Edgeworth, Fielding, Richardson, Smollett, Austen, Scott, Dickens, Thackeray, Trollope, Eliot, two of the Brontes, etc., etc., etc.
Don’t forget Geoffrey of Monmouth, who wrote a best-seller before the printing press was invented.
I have never heard of either author. I guess I have to do more reading. I’ve got three more books in the works, but don’t know if I will finish any of them. 23 in a lifetime would be a lot for me.
I must be a bit illiterate, for I have never read any books by most of the authors mentioned by Phoebe, nor am I familiar with Geoffrey of Monmouth. Dickens I have read, but most of the others, probably not.
Geoffrey had an international best-seller before the printing press was invented: History of the Kings of Britain.