
Guy N. Smith's literary masterpiece
The longest novel ever written is Guy N. Smith’s Night of the Crabs, which was first published in 1976 at 7,659 pages long. While hailed as a literary masterpiece, the novel’s dense language, intricate plot twists and relentless levels of sex and violence (one death scene runs for over three hundred pages) proved too much for many readers.
Smith later relented, and produced a shorter version of the book for more simple-minded readers, and this became a standard text for schools in the 1980s.