The Writers Who Wrote the Most in History
19 points
4 days ago
| 3 comments
| brennan.day
| HN
recursivedoubts
3 hours ago
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lol i clicked on the article prepared to be angry that GK Chesterton wasn't mentioned and he was the first one mentioned. His collected works run to at least 37 volumes:

https://www.chesterton.org/store/product/volume-xxxvii/

i have the first four

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bombcar
1 hour ago
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When your job is to produce writings every week, you produce a ton of writings.

About 15 volumes in I started to realize I’d read most of what he had to say; but it was still entertaining each time.

Given his size, perhaps he was the Largest Language Model.

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pglevy
1 hour ago
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I happened to dip into Heretics recently and thought, if someone were to publish one of these essays as a blog post today, it would be decried as AI slop. This must be who the models learned to write from.
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recursivedoubts
1 hour ago
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lol, he must have plagarized himself so many times over the years
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bombcar
1 hour ago
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Most (but by no means all) prolific authors do, eventually. You see it especially in podcasts, many of them start to somewhat repeat after a few tens or hundreds of episodes.
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damontal
3 hours ago
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Except he referred to him as G.J. Chesterton.
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antonvs
2 hours ago
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I hear he was good friends with H.F. Wells.
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__0x01
47 minutes ago
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Thanks for this. I especially enjoyed the section on word counting software and word linking games.
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slyall
2 hours ago
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Left out Charles Hamilton

It has been estimated by the researchers Lofts and Adley that Hamilton wrote around 100 million words or the equivalent of 1,200 average-length novels, making him the most prolific author in history. He is known to have created over 100 schools that were the subjects of his stories as well as writing many non-school stories. More than 5,000 of his stories have been identified, of which 3,100 were reprinted.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Hamilton_(writer)

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