Incidentally, are there any true examples of child prodigies who “didn’t live up to their potential”? I’m not talking about ones who died young, ones who got screwed over by society (like Sidis), or ones who had fine careers without being considered utter geniuses in later life. I’m talking about real burn-outs.
Mervyn Peake wrote the Gormenghast books. About a century after Mary Shelley died.
Am I missing some kind of in-joke here?
I hit a home run in Little League once…
ETA: Oops…I just remembered a second time. Guess I don’t belong in this thread. 
Emily Bronte wrote Wuthering Heights, which was her one & only novel. She had begun work on another, but died before getting anywhere with it.
Nobody could possibly say Einstein was a “one-hit wonder” though. Heck, his Nobel was for his work on the photoelectric effect, a phenomenon for which the practical applications are of some popular interest, but are really not the thing for which Einstein is famous. In 1905 he had no less than four major scientific articles published, on the photoelectric effect, Brownian motion, special relativity, and matter-energy equivalence, the last of which yielded what is probably the most famous (to laypeople) equation of all time, E = mc[sup]2[/sup]. And then he followed all of that up with general relativity–E = mc[sup]2[/sup] and all that “relativity” stuff being the things which most lay people associate with Einstein.
I have too but I couldn’t name a single one besides The Scream. Apparently he did one of Mary having sex! (technically NSFW, but come on, it’s art!)
In art, would Robert Indiana and his ‘LOVE’ painting/sculpture/silkscreen/greeting card/postage stamp/etc count?
His earlier work tick…tick…BOOM has been performed several times and become well known.
The writers of HAIR never had another successful musical.
Ken Kesey never equalled the success of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.
Sara Josepha Hale was a 19th century editor & abolitionist writer who also wrote some children’s poems, one of which was “Mary Had a Little Lamb”.
Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
Richard Hooker’s MAS*H
Clarence Day. Wrote the semi-autobiographical “Life With Father” The book sold amazingly well and was made into one of the longest-running Broadway plays. He did write a few other things but none of them did very well.
I happened onto one of his other, long-out-of-print books once at a used bookstore. “This Simian World”, which I personally think is a masterpiece, but which no one else has ever heard of.
SS
Missed the Edit:
ETA: Interestingly, a google search turned up the fact that this book was reissued in 1981…over sixty years after it’s first publication, at the personal insistance of Alfred A. Knopf who loved it. Guess I was wrong to say, no one had heard of it.
Day’s “Simian world” is back again
*
‘‘It is possible that our race may be an accident, in a meaningless universe, living its brief life uncared-for, on this dark, cooling star: but even so - and all the more -what marvelous creatures we are! A universe capable of giving birth to so many such accidents - blind or not -is a good world to live in, a promising universe.’’ *
-Clarence Day
How about John Gillespie Magee, Jr.?
Don’t forget *Sometimes a Great Notion *.
I misremembered the title of Valperga, and at any rate, The Last Man would have been a much better example. Freakin’ hilarious, no?
Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster never again equalled the success of creating Superman.
Remo Giazotto - a one-hit wonder who doesn’t even get credit for his extremely well-known Adagio in G minor, but it’s his own damn fault for trying to pass it off as being by Tomaso Albinoni.
Yes, that Adagio.
Most people would have problems recognizing the name “Joaquín Rodrigo”.
But I managed to catch the Figure Skating World Championship last weekend, and his Concierto de Aranjuez was featured several times, as usual; it’s one of those pieces I’d expect anybody to recognize, even if they can’t quite place it (among other things, because some of the interpretations are, uh, quite interpretative). Fantasía para un Gentilhombre is the only other one of his works that I can tell for sure I’ve also heard.
Heh, Heh back.
In the world of sports, I can think of a number of guys who had ONE spectacular day or moment in a career that, otherwise, never amounted to much.
Don Larsen
Clint Longley
Al Weis
Jack Squirek
Max McGee