The classics thread got me thinking about writers who have miraculously cranked out one good book and then wrote nothing but garbage.
Somebody else was saying that Tom Clancy is completely out of ideas. And it always seemed to me that Nathaniel Hawthorne had one plot to fill in - person gets cast out of society, feels lots and lots and oh so much shame and then validates themselves somehow.
A whole lot of people would disagree with me, but my couple are:
Joseph Heller - Catch 22
Hunter S Thompson - Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas
Harper Lee
Ken Keesey
How about authors who wrote only one book, period, but that book was a big hit?
Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell (which isn’t very good, but was a hit).
To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee. Lee is the greatest one hit wonder in history. She wrote a book that was a critical and commercial smash, quickly came to be regarded as a classic, and is still beloved by many today. And then she stopped writing.
A couple of others that wrote more than one, but are known for just one:
Frankenstein by Mary Shelley
Dracula by Bram Stoker
Huh? At least two - “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” and “Sometimes a Great Notion”. I’ll admit he’s not notably prolific.
“A Confederacy of Dunces,” whose career was cut short by suicide. Of course, you’d have readers argue that the book doesn’t deserve to be called a hit in the first place.
Having written an essay on Heller for Oxford’s American National Biography, I’d have to agree about “Catch-22.”
The writer I was thinking about when I started this thread was Umberto Eco (although I don’t know how many people have heard of him.) He managed to write one good book, The Name of the Rose, but everything else he ever churned out was complete and utter horseshit. Pretentious horseshit, even.
Daowajan: It’s been a while but I enjoyed Eco’s Foucault’s Pendulum. Intricate, even confusing at times, but by no means horseshit.
Garnted, one big book, but you do have to put a star next to Mitchell- I think it was fairly soon after it, while she was working on a sequel, she was killed in an accident.
Why put a star? She had exactly one popular book. The accident explains why she never wrote anything else, but it doesn’t alter that fact. We have no way of knowing whether subsequent books would have been successful.
Had it not been for the accident, Mitchell may well have gone on to more success. Had it not been for her murder, Selena may have been a big crossover pop star. Had it not been for the rabid fan attack, Monica Seles may have continued to dominate women’s tennis for years to come. Had it not been for Kevin Mclory’s lawsuit, Timothy Dalton may have made six or seven Bond movies. Had he not served four years in WW2 and Korea, Ted Williams might be the all-time hit leader. And maybe none of these things would have happened. We’ll never know.
These things did happen, and the careers of the people involved were damaged or cut short. This does not make the things they did accomplish any greater for their unfulfilled potential Potential is not achievement.
Does anyone know whatever happened to Donna Tartt? Judging by the numerous mentions it gets in favourite book threads, The Secret History has quite the cult following. Too bad the author seems to have dropped out of sight.
I have to disagree about Joseph Heller and Umberto Eco, though. I enjoyed Heller’s Good as Gold and thought the structure of Something Happened made it a particularly unsettling read with an ending that packed one helluva punch.
Along with Name of the Rose, I also enjoyed Foucault’s Pendulum. It was a refreshing antidote to Robert Anton Wilson’s The Illuminatus! which covers similar territory in a far less elegant manner.
Hodge
It’s been a long time since I read the book or studied this author, but didn’t Ralph Ellison never follow up on “Invisible Man”?
Ellison had been working and reworking a novel before he died. It was published a year or so ago as “Juneteenth,” but it made little impact beyond initial publication.
Thanks, pesch. I remember reading when he died that Ellison had another book almost ready for publication, but I didn’t remember if it had been, or not.
This is for Hodge, other Donna Tartt fans and the merely curious.
From this site Tribulation will be published early next year.
Yet, because it came out so many years after the original, seemed more a ripoff than it might have actually been. And it is sad he didn’t go deeper, as Italy is the home of so much intrigue that suggests Illuminati involvement to the suggestible. For instance, I was reading “Illuminatus” when the Adolfo Sarti scandal broke.
Also, H.P. Saint wrote an incredible book called “Memoirs of an Invisible Man” about 15 years ago, and nothing else.
I tried to read Something Happened and just couldn’t. I got about halfway through when I finally just said “Okay, I get the point. Enough already.” I thought Vonnegut’s review of it as “A metal statue being made by taps of a ball-peen hammer” was apt, except I kind of felt the hammer was on my skull.
I too disagree about Foucault’s Pendulum. I’ve read it three times and enjoyed it every time, versus once for Name of the Rose. I’ve also read The Illuminatus Trilogy several times. I’ve never felt the Eco book was a ripoff because The Illuminatus Trilogy goes into so many other directions, many of them hopelessly silly and out of date (I wince when I read the part about how the more advanced folks have more hair.) The Eco book is much more streamlined and pays attention to its ideas better, in addition to staying grounded a little better. It also has a much more satisfying ending.
I thought Helen Fielding’s Bridget Jones’s(sic) Diary was pretty funny. However, the sequel, The Edge of Reason, felt like a last minute cash-in. (I mean, c’mon - they didn’t even bother to print a different cover…)