Famous novels supposedly written in a few days

Over the years I have come across claims by various people that certain famous novels were written in a very short period of time. These claims have a suspicious sameness about them. There’s never any supporting evidence given, not even a direct quote from the author. The time period claimed is always either two or three days. Never one, never four. I have heard the story about London’s Call of the Wild, Stevenson’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Voltaire’s Candide, and Stephen King’s The Running Man (published under his Richard Bachman pseudonym).

They are all rather short novels, and I assume we’re talking about just the first draft, not the completed book. But is there evidence to support any of these claims? I would be willing to accept the word of the author in most cases, and would consider the word of someone close to the author (spouse, child, literary agent, etc.).

Finally, I want to hear what similar stories you have heard about other novels. Did someone once try to tell you that War and Peace was written on a paper napkin during a three-martini lunch? Did you believe them after the third one?

One of the most famous examples, though I’m not sure if it’s myth or fact, must be the writing of On the Road–supposedly written over a few days of drug-induced stupor on one continuous ream of paper (so Kerouac wouldn’t have to waste time whipping a new page into the typerwriter, I guess).

In Zen and the Art of Writing, Ray Bradbury claims the first draft of Farenheit 451 was written over a very short period–perhaps 10 days, for a total of 25,000 words (he goes on to state the final draft was about 50,000 words). In the same book, Bradbury recalls the events leading up to the publication of the Martian Chronicles, and how he had one night to write several of those basic single-page interconnecting stories in order to make the whole work more thematically unified, because he had to show it all to a publisher in the morning.

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I don’t know about The Running Man, but I can well believe that Dreamcatcher was written in a day, by cutting and pasting from Tommyknockers and It. Similarly with creating Desperation from The Regulators (or vice versa).
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I’m not certain, but I believe Naked Lunch* fell out of William S. Burroughs typewriter in a cold turkey lock-in (coming off heroin) over 11 days and nights.

But I could be wrong.

I believe that would be a very interesting HTML rendering above. Wonder if someone can implement it.

Okay, scrap that idea.

Seems Burroughs wrote it over the course of a year, whilst on heroin, in Tangiers. So much for that rumour, then.

(Damn that i and b confusion…Ghrrrr!!)

Samuel Johnson is supposed to have written Rasselas in 6 days, to help cover the expenses of his mother’s funeral. The only citation I can find for that in short order is here, which says it was written “in a week’s time.”

It’s a fairly short book. The whole text is online at http://newark.rutgers.edu/~jlynch/Texts/rasselas.html

Well, Iain (M) Banks claims that each year he spends the first nine months travelling round and visiting friends without a thought about his next novel, then he sits down and bangs out either a fiction or non-fiction work in the rest of the year. I don’t have a cite, i’m afraid. I read it in an interview with him in a sunday paper. He does publish roughly a book a year, though.

I remember this clearly as i thought at the time, how wonderful to spend thre quarters of each year playing, then pour forth such excellent prose for the next three months. Then I thought, wonder how good he’d be if he really buckled down to it?

Mary Shelley supposedly wrote Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus overnight.
Of course, this is supposedly one of those well-documented truths, with regards to the whole ghost story contest with Lord Byron, Percy, et al.

While not nearly in the same category as the aforementioned novels–and indeed, probably unworthy to even deserve mention in this thread–allegedly The Bridges of Madison County was written during a long weekend.

In the book’s introduction, George MacDonald Fraser claimed to have written The General Danced at Dawn in about as much time as it takes to read it, IIRC (I read it around 25 years ago).

Veering slightly off-topic, virtuallly every hit song of the last centruy was allegedly written in 15 minutes.

Are you thinking of the anecdote concerning Mary, Byron and Polidori telling each other ghost stories one night? It suggests that out of that evening came Shelley’s Frankenstein and Polidori’s The Vampyre (supposedly based on Byron). I think that if the story’s true, it just means that Shelley conceived of the bare bones of the story that night.

Jean Cocteau apparently wrote Les Enfants Terribles over a very short amount of time. He went abroad to write the novel, spent four months lying on the coach eating boiled sweets (entirely pissing off his boyfriend, Jean Marais) then wrote furiously for two weeks. I think it’s true.

Oh, and apparently Enid Blyton wrote one of her children’s books over one weekend.

Yes. But the anecdote, is that they challenged each other to write a truly frightening story and present it the next night. Now, how rough of a draft it was…

Addressing the OP: I don’t have much to offer, but I have I heard Stephen King say in interviews that he tries to write at least 10,000 words a day (or used to).

That could certainly make for a short novel in less than a week.

In Literary Feuds, Anthony Arthur writes about Hemingway:

But this is nothing at all compared to genre writers. Barry Malzberg wrote the biographical essay on Robert Silverberg for the special Silverberg issue of the Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction many years ago (April 1974, to be exact), which haunts me to this very day.

I must point out for those unfamiliar with his career that while he was a true hack in the 1960s, Silverberg slowed down to a mere two or three books a year in the 1970s, all of incredibly high quality and still readable today.

I remember hearing on the radio once that Handel’s Messiah was written in two weeks. The same program went on to say that now they think Handel was manic-depressive. Anybody know anything about it?

Well, I´ve got a cite for Stevenson - from the highly recommendable “Writing on Drugs” by Sadie Plant:

Sheds quite an interesting light on the story.

it’s a little known fact that Ayn had developed a lab for turning coffee & cigarrettes into a caffeine-nicotine prototype for crystal meth- it was while on this, she wrote ATLAS SHRUGGED in three days, working 24/7- “This Is John Galt” speech only took 38 min
17 sec.

And now you know… the rest of the story!

Good day!