World Literature

Literature — written stories, poetry, and drama — begins with the Epic of Gilgamesh (Sumerian, c. 2100 BCE) and includes Homer's Iliad and Odyssey, the Mahabharata, the Bible, Chinese poetry (Li Bai, Du Fu), Arabian Nights, Dante's Divine Comedy, Shakespeare, Cervantes's Don Quixote, Goethe's Faust, Tolstoy's War and Peace, Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov, Proust's In Search of Lost Time, Joyce's Ulysses, García Márquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude. The Nobel Prize in Literature (awarded since 1901) has recognized writers from 90+ countries in 30+ languages — the most globally representative of all Nobel Prizes. Don Quixote (Cervantes, 1605) is considered the first modern novel. War and Peace (Tolstoy, 1869, 1,440 pages) is the largest-scale study of human behavior in fiction. Proust's In Search of Lost Time (3,000 pages) is the longest novel in the world.