How long does it take to read The Public Burning?
The Public Burning by Robert Coover takes about 9 hours 47 minutes to read at 250 words a minute.
About 9 hours 47 minutes
A week or two of reading
First published 1977. 534 pages, about 146,850 words.
20 days at 30 minutes a day
Estimate based on 275 words per page.
At other speeds
| Slow, 150 words a minute | 16 hours 19 minutes |
| Average, 250 words a minute | 9 hours 47 minutes |
| Fast, 400 words a minute | 6 hours 7 minutes |
The page count is the median across 7 editions, so your copy may differ. How we calculate.
About the book
A controversial best-seller in 1977, The Public Burning has since emerged as one of the most influential novels of our time. The first major work of contemporary fiction ever to use living historical figures as characters, the novel reimagines the three fateful days in 1953 that culminated with the execution of alleged atomic spies Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. Vice-President Richard Nixon - the voraciously ambitious bad boy of the Eisenhower regime - is the dominant narrator in an enormous cast that includes Betty Crocker, Joe McCarthy, the Marx Brothers, Walter Winchell, Uncle Sam, his adversary The Phantom, and Time magazine incarnated as the National Poet Laureate. All of these and thousands more converge in Times Square for the carnivalesque auto-da-fe at which the Rosenbergs are put to death. And not a person present escapes implication in Cold War America's ruthless "public burning."
Subjects: Communists, Communistes, Procès (Espionnage), Fiction, Trials (Espionage), Romans, nouvelles
