Which brings us to the point of this one - great works that are shorter than the usual example of their genre: one speech, one music album and one novel.
It's hard to imagine anyone making better use of 272 words than Abraham Lincoln did when dedicating part of the battlefield at Gettysburg as a war cemetery. Since it's so short, the easiest thing to do is quote it in its entirety:
Fourscore and seven years ago our fathers brought forth, on this continent, a new nation, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived, and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battle-field of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting-place for those who here gave their lives, that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this. But, in a larger sense, we cannot dedicate, we cannot consecrate—we cannot hallow—this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us—that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they here gave the last full measure of devotion—that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain—that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom, and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.It can be modernised in equally compact terms, as a PowerPoint presentation (complete with obligatory 3-D histogram) or even a 140 character Tweet (remember those?) - though it perhaps loses a little in translation...
Next up, Willie Nelson's The Red Headed Stranger album. Clocking in at just 33:30 for the whole album, there's not a note wasted. You can even - and absolutely should - watch Willie do the whole thing live in a little over half an hour (autoplay the follow-on tracks):
Finally, if you want a fine example of literature that won't take a Moby Dick of time to read, try Hemmingway's 27,000 word The Old Man and the Sea. Other than saying it's as good a book as you'll ever read on the transcendent nature of struggle, I'll spare you my literary analysis. You could just about read the book the time it took to read it anyway. Oh, and the New York Times was unstinting in its praise, describing it as "better than his last one".
