How long does it take to read Hollywood?
a novel of America in the 1920s
Hollywood by Gore Vidal takes about 9 hours 30 minutes to read at 250 words a minute.
Part of Narratives of Empire
Previous: Empire Next: The Golden Age
About 9 hours 30 minutes
A week or two of reading
First published 1989. 518 pages, about 142,450 words.
19 days at 30 minutes a day
Estimate based on 275 words per page.
At other speeds
| Slow, 150 words a minute | 15 hours 50 minutes |
| Average, 250 words a minute | 9 hours 30 minutes |
| Fast, 400 words a minute | 5 hours 56 minutes |
The page count is the median across 19 editions, so your copy may differ. How we calculate.
About the book
Hollywood marks the fifth episode in Gore Vidal's "Narratives of Empire," his celebrated series of six historical novels that form his extended biography of the United States. It is 1917, and President Woodrow Wilson is about to lead the country into the Great War in Europe. In California, a new industry is born that will irreversibly transform America. Caroline Sanford, the alluring heroine of Empire, discovers the power of moving pictures to manipulate reality as she vaults to screen stardom under the name of Emma Traxler. Just as Caroline must balance her two lives - West Coast movie star and East Coast newspaper publisher and senator's mistress - so too must America balance its two power centers: Hollywood and Washington.
Subjects: Motion picture industry, Motion picture industry in fiction, Fiction, California, fiction, Hollywood (los angeles, calif.), fiction, Los angeles (calif.), fiction
