JD Salinger. Like many of the other people in this thread, he had a number of works of his belt, mainly short stories. But if it wasn’t for Catcher in the Rye, I doubt most people today would know who he was.
And of course he lived out the last 40 years of his life without publishing anything.
Possibly the most widely read academic work of the 20th century was Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. It impacted the way people thought about the world across multiple disciplines, from physics to art history, and from philosophy to revolutionary politics. Radical leftists loved it, even though the book is deeply imbued with Kuhn’s instinctive conservatism. Nothing else he wrote (and there was not all that much of it) came anywhere close to having its influence. Most other influential scholars have their influence as much from the sheer mass of their publications as anything else. Kuhn outdid nearly all of them with one slender volume.
Actually, as Van Gogh only sold one painting in his life (and one drawing, I believe), he sort of qualifies.
Charles Lindberg.
He flew across the Atlantic (the body of water, not the publication). Once. And then he spent the rest of his life bragging about it.
Guessing that you’re joking on this one. But for those who don’t know, Lindbergh was an accomplished pilot long before his solo Atlantic crossing. He flew airmail in very dangerous conditions.
After he became famous he did route proving for the airlines, served as a consultant to the military (after having been an isolationist, which he quickly dropped once we actually went to war), and flew in combat in the Pacific during World War II.
Not to say he wasn’t a man with flaws, but being a braggart was most definitely not one of them.
Grant Wood is very well-known for** American Gothic**. His serious fans can probably think of other canvases, but the general public…?
I´m sorry, I didn’t mean to offend. I even left out some hilarious jokes about frequent flyer miles and those little bags of peanuts they give you.
But still, being a consultant to the military and fighting in a war, while certainly being a praiseworthy profession and every patriot´s duty, respectively, aren´t the kind of things that would land you in the history books. Of couse, being the Columbus of the air is kind of hard to top, isn’t it?
Not a great example–Wood was actually very prolific, and most top American museums exhibit his pieces. The “general public” as a rule knows squat about art.
Bram Stoker might fit here. He did other things outside of Dracula, but they’ve only gotten attention as novelties.
Fred Exley wrote a couple of books after “A Fan’s Notes,” but they weren’t very good, at least in most people’s opinion.
God.
Sure, He created the universe (and the internet), but then what?
Yes, very hard to top. By those criteria, Neil Armstrong is a one hit wonder. And he’s another example of someone who was quite remarkable both before and after he got famous for his “one big thing”. Or in his case, one giant leap.
Yes, and Mary Shelley also wrote Gormenghast, as influential in its way as that other book of hers.
Sadly, we are discussing “hits,” which by definition are pieces known to the general public or are at least well-known by people outside of serious scholars of the specific artist. No artist ever did one and only one canvas which went on to become a huge cultural icon; there were the thousands of practice canvases, the pieces he did to learn his art, and the subsequent ones that never resonated with the public conscious quite the same way. Grant Wood will always be the American Gothic guy.
Martin Gardner was a collector of poetry by one-hit wonder poets:
He lists the following poems, each of which is the only famous poem by some poet:
“Casey at the Bat”
“The Night before Christmas”
“The House by the Side of the Road”
“Out Where the West Begins”
“The Lost Chord”
“The Old Oaken Bucket”
“Evolution”
“Evolution” is not only the only well-known poem by that poet (Langdon Smith), it was the only poem by him.
William Sidis a major child genius. IQ over 200. Enrolled in Harvard at 11.
Complete burn out as an adult. Accomplished nothing in science or math.
There have been other child prodigy’s like that. Never lived up to their potential.
My Google skills are failing me right now.
Another book example: David R. Palmer wrote Emergence, a successful Science Fiction book that reminded many of Heinlein. Not a big hit but popular at the time.
I’d say *The Last Man *is a bit more famous than Gormenghast, but hey.
And thank you for considering me a serious scholar of Grant Wood, even though I’ve never read a book on the man or taken a single art history class. I am proud to say that I have a few reproductions of his work, though–none of which include American Gothic 
I believe he also did “Arrangement in Grey and Black #2”.
My editor used The Vampireto illustrate an article I did, so yeah.
I’ve also seem a lot of Munch coffee table books, so SOMEBODY must be a fan of his other stuff.
Seems to me we had a roughly similar discussion about Carl Sagan not long ago.
(Rummages around the Search function.) Yup, here it is. The discussion was whether Sagan was actually a good astronomer, or just a celebrity.
And so it is with a lot of writers, musicians, artists, etc., who toil in obscurity, maybe get known for one thing, and then go back to toiling in obscurity.
Albert Einstein won one Nobel Prize. Van Cliburn won one international competition. That doesn’t mean they spent the second half of their lives as failures.
Actually, aceplace57, it appears that William Sidis was not a burn-out:
It really appears to me that what happened was that Sidis lost interest in doing the sort of things that his parents wanted him to do. He got interested in radical politics and was sent to prison for it on what sounds like trumped-up charges. After that everyone was determined to see that he never did succeed at anything. Even his parents did nothing to help him. A lot of people already disliked him because they hated the idea of a child prodigy. He wasn’t allowed to do anything of importance after that. He died at 46.