Some artists are known for their enormous volume of works–Stephen King, Tom Clancey, Ed McBain, Marry Higgins Clark come to mind.
Some artists with an equal amount of works are known as “the person who wrote…” the only one work that everybody knows.
Madeline L’Engle wrote A Wrinkle in Time, a book that everyone knows and has read. Howver, she wrote a lot of very good books that few people know about.
Similarly, Roald Dahl, for everything he wrote, is remembered for writing Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. And while everyone remembers the Alfred Hitchcock episode about the woman who kills her husand with a frozen leg of lamb, how many know that it was on Dahl’s short story A Lambe to the Slaughter.
And for one of my favorites, most people who say “I hate Andrew Lloyd Webber” know he wrote CATS. He wrote 14 other works, but let’s judge him on one alone.
John Galsworthy wrote The Forsythe Saga. He wrote a metric buttload of other novels, and was very popular in his day, but no one remembers any other works.
F. Van Wyck Mason was a very prolific, popular American author who is now practically forgotten.
Traffic is only known to the general music audience (if at all) for “The Low Spark of High Heeled Boys.”
The Band – one of the biggest groups of the early 70s – is only known to modern audiences for “The Weight.”
Joseph Heller is known for Catch-22. He wasn’t prolific, but he did write other books (though none as successful).
Loudon Wainwright III has put out dozens of albums over the past 40 years, but if he’s known at all for his music, it’s because of “Dead Skunk.” (He’s also mentioned as the father of Rufus Wainwright).
Arlo Guthrie makes it a trifecta! And his father Woody is mostly known for “This Land is Your Land.”
Tom Paxton doesn’t even make the list, because everone knows a lot of the songs he wrote, but they are either attributed to someone else (John Denver did not write Whose Garden Was This? and Forest Lawn), or thought of as traditional folk songs, i.e. Rambling Boy.
My favorite in this category is H. Rider Haggard, who wrote and is remembered today for King Solomon’s Mines and She, but was extremely prolific: he must have written some forty or so other books, most of which have long been forgotten.
Agreed. It’s just as legitimate to say “I hate Andrew Lloyd Webber because he wrote Phantom of the Opera*”
*[sub]Or Evita, or Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat, or Starlight Express. Especially Starlight Express. But, hey, I don’t like musicals so what do I know?[/sub]
Harriet Beecher Stowe wrote a stack of books. But all anyone knows about is Uncle Tom’s Cabin. If you go to her house in Hartford (She was literally Mark Twain’s next-door neighbor) they have copies of her books on her shelves. I didn’t recognize any of them, aside from UTC, and still can’t remember them – I’ve got to use the internet.
(By contrast, even I can name other songs by Don MacLean)
** B. Traven** is probably not even known by most people who otherwise know his work. He wrote The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, and I hads been under the impression that was all he wrote. The enigmatic writer actually wrote several novels (at any rate, several were published under that name), but AFAIK, no others were filmed, or made a big impression on most of the public. we still don’t know for sure who he was:
And, of course, my favorite, whose books I’m still reading, is Jules Verne. Of course, people know he wrote other books (mainly because of the movies ostensibly adapted from them. Or, in the case of my generation, of Classics Illustrated adaptations). But they have no idea of quite how many he wrote – over sixty novels, not to mention nonfiction and (his biggest source of income), his plays. But you’re only likely to find a handful in bookstore – mostly Around the World in eight days, Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, A Journey to the Center of the Earth. And, if you’re lucky, The Mysterious Island. But most people have never even heard of his vast collection of other novels – Propellor Island, Cesar Cascabel, The Begum’s Fortune, For the Flag, and so on. But that last one has been filmed two or three times, is Verne’s third novel featuring a submarine, and also has guided missiles in it.
For that matter, although people know of a handful of his more fantastic works – The Invisible Man, The War of the Worlds, First Men in the Moon, The Time Machine, most people are unaware of the vast number of other fantastic works, including the ones with even more impressive predictions – * The War in the Air*, about the implications of airplanes in warfare, or The World Set Free (atomic bombs dropped from those planes. And actually called “atomic bombs”). Or about his large number of non-fantastic novels about “free love” and society.
Could Yoko Ono fit this? She’s well known for non-musical reasons and two of her Lennon collaboration albums sold well, but as a solo artist she is known by the public at large for one song, ‘Walking On Thin Ice’, despite releasing 11 studio albums, remix albums, compilations etc. over a span of 40 years.
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle saw early on that he was going to be defined by one character, Sherlock Holmes. So much so that he killed him off after a mere 14 stories. He always thought his historical novels were his best work. You know how well that worked.
Lots of writers have created one memorable character who overshadow the rest of their long careers. Most people can’t name the creator of Zorro, although Johnston McCulley was the author of hundreds of stories, fifty novels, and numerous screenplays for film and television.
H. G. Wells was probably better known for his nonfiction while he was alive than for the early fiction that we remember today. Who reads Ann Veronica or Brynhild or the Bulpington of Blup? (I also thought Cal was writing about Verne and missed that last paragraph.)
How many people can name a single book by Robert Bloch other than Psycho?
