With a nod to Unca Cecil, Nostradamus
Don Mclean has Starry Starry Night to keep him off the One-Hit Wonders lists.
Actually, the correct title of that song is Vincent.
Just sayin’.
Vangelis has made a lot of great music over the years, but many people are unaware he ever did anything except the “Chariots of Fire” soundtrack.
Robert Penn Warren had a long, distinguished career, but is known to most people solely as the author of All the King’s Men.
Alexandre Dumas (pere) is mostly known only for The Three Musketeers and The Count of Monte Cristo. Maybe you could include The Man in the Iron Mask and The Corsican Brothers, although I don’t know if most people would identify him as the author.
But he has a huge list of works, which includes plays, non-fiction, and more stories of the Musketeers. (And yet the Disney movie adaptation ignored all of them but for the names. The Richard Lester-directed movie The Four Musketeers is actually only the second half of the first book, though Return of the Musketeers is based on Twenty Years After.)
He also wrote a handful of hits for other artists. For example, Perry Como’s last big hit was Don McLean’s “And I Love You So.”
Let’s not forget Pearl Buck, who won a Nobel Prize for her body of work, of which most people have only ever heard of The Good Earth.
I doubt if much more than 1 percent of the population could name Dave Brubek, much less recognize “Take Five” abd name it.
I read Vingt Ans Apres. And some other stuff. I would have to say, the Musketeers (with the classic three-duels-in-ten-minutes opening) and Monte Cristo (with the prison/escape scene – and Oh my God have you been to Chateau D’If in Marseilles? It is beautiful and exactly what you imagined) are what he should be remembered for. The contemporaneous dispute over “the literary workshop of M. Dumas” (implicitly accusing him of hiring appentices to write much of his stuff) seems in my uninformed opinon to have been . . . probably on the money. The sequels to the Musketeers dragged on and on and on (as did the unabridged Musketeers, mind you).
Pierre Boulle - not well known at all - but you might have heard of Planet of the Apes or seen Bridge Over the River Kwai
Children’s writers seem to suffer this fate–L. Frank Baum wroe about more than Oz, and Lewis Carroll more than Wonderland, but who remembers them for anything else?
I mentioned Ed McBain in my OP. Most peole only remember Evan Hunter for writing “Blackboard Jungle,” but he was very prolific. The punchline being McBain was Hunter’s alter ego.
If you look at pre-20th century authors, it might be quicker to list the ones that don’t fall into this category (and haven’t been forgotten entirely).
Robert Louis Stevenson wrote a dozen novels, plus poetry, travel books and several collections of short stories. Today, everyone’s heard of Treasure Island and The Strange Case of Dr Jeckyll and Mr Hyde - but how many can think of a third (though Kidnapped and The Master of Ballentrae have both been TV series in the UK).
Anthony Hope wrote more than 30 novels - good luck finding anyone who’s heard of more than The Prisoner of Zenda.
The Scarlet Letter was not Nathaniel Hawthorne’s only novel, and he also wrote short stories.
James Fennimore Cooper - another one who wrote 30 novels. He’s remembered for Last of the Mohicans and Mark Twain’s commentry on it. Come to that, I wonder how many people can name Twain’s works past Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer?
To the masses, Van Morrison’s career is simply Brown Eyed Girl, Moondance or possibly Gloria, while his vast catalog of music (30+ original albums) is universally revered by musicians and music critics alike.
He may be THE ultimate “musician’s musician” but to the average punter, he is just another oldies-circut one hit wonder…
I came to mention Golden Earring, but someone beat me to it.
I’ll instead offer Nena who has been reliably kicking out awesome music post- 99 Luftballons
Rush? 36 years, 18 studio albums, and most people can name “Tom Sawyer” and probably nothing else.
I have to dispute this. Perhaps things have changed since I was a kid, but each of these authors were featured in the game “Authors”, so anyone who played that knows at least four works by each. And Classics Illustrated gave you more (they really seemed to like Cooper – I think they adapted all of the Leatherstocking stories except The Pioneers). And i easily know lots of novels and short stories by both authors – House of Seven Gables, Tanglewood Tales, Twice-Told Stories – and that’s without trying. CooperFor Twain it’s Connecticut Yankee, Joan of Arc, Prince and the Pauper, Life on the Mississippi, Pudd’nhead Wilson. I admit that I’m a huge Twain fan, but the guy has gotten a lot of press over the past couple of decades. I think he’s better known.
By the way, Twain wrote two literary takedowns of Cooper. Besides the more famous “Cooper’s Literary Offenses” ( Fenimore Cooper's Literary Offenses ), there is “Cooper’s Prose Style”, which appeared in the way-posthumous collection Letters from the Earth: LLumina.com is for sale | HugeDomains
As did I. they’ve been around for over 40 years, and 40 of those with the same core of 4 guys. They have 24 or so albums and tour the Netherlands constantly. I’ve seen them twice, and they still rock and sell out where they play.
Perhaps it’s the difference between British and American literary culture - I’d certainly heard nothing of any other works by Hawthorne until I looked him up to see if he had written anything else, and Last of the Mohicans is the only title of Cooper’s that would get significant recognition on this side of the Atlantic. But they may well be better remembered in the US. Twain was a guess, after the comment on Cooper got me thinking of him - he wrote two stories that everyone’s heard of and then … I wondered how much the rest of his work was known outside literary circles.* Connecticut Yankee* is a good comeback though.
I’ve never heard of the game “Authors” - I don’t think we have it in the UK, and if we did the authors would probably be different.
That’s too bad – a lot of the authors in the game are British – Dickens, Shakespeare
What’s his famous song?
Well, true, but I think Unbreakable and Signs were decent hits. It’s true that he will probably always be remembered for that movie, though.
I thought most of his works were still not translated from Florinese, though.
