[QUOTE=wikipedia]
“W. E. Johns was a prolific author and editor. In his 46-year writing career (1922–68) he penned over 160 books, including nearly one hundred Biggles books, more than sixty other novels and factual books, and scores of magazine articles and short stories.”
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His popularity was sparked by his early “true fiction” accounts of WWI flying. The later books are achieving well-deserved obscurity.
I’m not making a statement on the quality of his work but Piers Anthony was a mainstay of genre fiction from the 70s to the early 90s when he released dozens of books in several popular series. Now he is barely footnote who is probably only still discussed because he is a creep.
How about Helen MacInnes? The Salzburg Connection was a bestseller for many weeks.
Ross MacDonald the author of the Lew Archer novels?
John D. MacDonald the author of the Travis McGee series?
John R. Tunis and Clair Bee both authored many books about baseball and basketball respectively.
John Dos Passos.
Leon Uris
Len Deighton
Eric Ambler
Daphne DuMaurier is not exactly forgotten- she’s remembered for the popular movie versions of some of her works- especially Alfred Hitchcock’s*** Rebecca ***and The Birds.
Still she was a VERY prolific writer and an extremely popular one. Given that, it’s amazing how few of her works have endured. The following novels by Daphne DuMaurier reached #1 on the New York Times Best Seller List, but I’ll bet most SDMB regulars have never heard of any of them (I hadn’t):
Frenchman’s Creek
The King’s General
The Parasites
My Cousin Rachel
Mary Anne
The Scapegoat
The Glass Blowers
If we look only at authors who have hit #1 on the New York Times Best Seller Lists multiple times but who are pretty obscure today…
John P. Marquand - his #1 novels include*** Point of No Return***, ***Sincerely Willis Wayde, *** ***So Little Time ***and BF’s Daughter. And his “Mr. Moto” detective stories were hugley popular once.
But today? I think he qualifies as obscure.
Ever heard of Thomas Costain? He was a Canadian journalist who sarted writing historical novels late in life. He hit #1 on the Times Best Seller list three times, with The Black Rose, ***The Silver Chalice ***and **The Moneyman. **
The Scotish physician/novelist AJ Cronin had 3 #1 best sellers, but isn’t widely read any more.
Probably not obscure in Britain, but in the US John Wyndham might be getting to obscure. Wyndham wrote “The Day of the Triffids” and “The Midwich Cuckoos” both of which were made into a pretty good 50s scifi horror movies. (The Midwich Cuckoo movie is called “Village of the Damned” and I suspect is the better known of the two.)
Wow, haven’t thought of him for years (I grew up largely in the UK.)
In the same vein, J.P. Donleavy. Best known for The Ginger Man that got panned for being obscene. He wrote many delightful books, including one about a man with three testicles (three grapes on the end of his stem IIRC) and I read them all in the 1970s. He is in his 90s and still alive and kicking.
I doubt that, as most of the people reading Harry Potter are already unfamiliar with British boarding schools. As long as their are schools, it’ll work, even if you think living on campus is strange. It would just seem like yet another anachronism kept going by magic and lack of contact with the rest of the world.
I think they’ll more likely fade for seeming cliche.
I don’t believe anyone has yet mentioned Max Brand. According to the Wikipedia article, “(Brand) rivalled Edgar Wallace and Isaac Asimov as one of the most prolific authors of all time”.
On a tangential note (popular, not prolific), Olive Schreiner
From the first half of the last century, I’ve got volumes from the “Little Leather Library Corporation New York”. Most of them feature names that are still well known today, if less popular. Tennyson. Wilde. Kipling. Shakespeare. Dickens. A.C.Doyle.
Gaston Leroux churned out dozens of novels-sometimes publishing two or three in a single year. At one point his books were being made into films as soon as they were printed.
The only one widely recognized today is “Phantom of the Opera,” and I think people are starting to associate that with Andrew Lloyd Webber instead.
Pearl S Buck who won a Nobel prize for literature for God’s sake. I read a number of her books from the library in the seventies but haven’t heard anythign about her for years.
When Pearl S. Buck came up when there was a similar thread back in 2010 and someone suggested that she was completely forgotten in the UK, I observed:
I may as well take the opportunity to recommend Christopher Fowler’s 2012 book Invisible Ink, based on his long-running Independent on Sunday column. The whole idea is to highlight once-famous authors or works that have been forgotten. He doesn’t quite recommend all of them, but it’s a good source of off-beat reading material, as well as a meditation on the vagaries of literary reputations.