Anthony Burgess wrote 2,000 words a day. Finished copy, mind you, not drafts. This would have put him in the middleweight division of the 19th century, when heavy hitters like Charles Dickens and Honoré de Balzac set the pace. Burgess was in many ways a 19th century writer, but he lived in the 20th century. The longer it went on, the less writers wrote, probably because there was something more interesting at the movies or on TV.