Many of Robert Coover's and Stanley Elkin's opening lines are mega-sentences.

I missed the essay so thanks. I love long sentences though I usually have to read mine out loud for them to make any sense.

You forget that certain works were more songs than "sentences".

My guess is the longest sentence ever written in English is buried somewhere in someone's blog.

Unlike anyone at The Stranger, my undergrad degree's in journalism. Ten words are about my limit. There's a good reason for that, too - that's pretty much the limit of most peoples' attention span.

@4 tl;dr

That was a good eulogy, by the way.

The title of this post immediately popped into my mind the Dead Kennedy's song Life Sentence. Thanks, Paul.

*Kennedys'. Or maybe it's more punk to misspell it?

Henry James was the master of the long, meandering, more or less unreadable sentence.

Lester Bangs might've given Joyce a run for his money if he'd just stuck with speed.

What's up NYT, shouldn't "Ulysses" be italicized?