One-hit wonder authors

Two of my most favourite classic novels were written by authors whose other work doesn't grab me at all: Moby Dick by Herman Melville, and Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte. I've read up on other works by each of them and nothing tempts me. Ever read a classic and get excited about discovering a new "favourite author", only to discover ... not so much?

I don't know that I can say that I have. Though part of it may be that I simply haven't yet gotten to others by them, due to so many others waiting to be read already.

Well the "one hit wonder" title implies that the author
didnʻt give the reader a shot
at anything else, good or bad.

I suppose it might be used
for an author whose next, after a "hit" was a big disappointment. In my reading experience back in the ʻ60s, two in that category were Richard Yates
and Francis Pollini. Revolutionary Road was a hard act to follow, but Yatesʻs subsequent novels and short stories are well worth reading.
As for the much less known Pollini, his Night (ca. 1960)
was not that much better
perhaps not even as good as, his Glover which followed
it and was disappointing to me, in my 30s. Thinking it over, Glover may be the
better novel - - more thoughtful, anyway.

I suppose this operates on two levels: one being, similar to the music sense, an author only really did write one good book and the rest are objectively terrrible; the other sense being personal to the reader (which is what I meant in my initial post), in that a particular work performs magic and leaves me feeling in awe, but everything else by that author just makes me scratch my head or yawn.

eg. Suppose one Dickens novel really hit home with you, but nothing else of his came even close. Happily not the case for me ...

>1 Cecrow:,>4 Cecrow:
There's the case where you've tried the "other works" but didn't find them interesting or worthwhile, but there's also the case where you know that the other works exist, but simply can't work up the interest to go out and look for them. It isn't easy to think of examples of the first case - maybe Joyce Cary where I thought The horse's mouth was a brilliant book, but everything else of his I've tried has been a disappointment. Or Aldous Huxley, whose "other novels" I tried to read when I was probably far too young to appreciate them.

The second case is much more common, especially when you have a book that has become well-known outside the genre it belongs to. Beau Geste and The prisoner of Zenda are obvious examples - you don't have to be addicted to turn-of-the-century adventure stories to have read them, but you would be pretty unlikely to to have read anything else by their authors unless you were.

Dodie Smith might be an extreme case of the second category, having written two very popular "one hit wonder" books in distinct categories that appeal to different groups of readers, whilst her main body of work as a playwright is largely forgotten...

>3 rolandperkins:
Nice to see that the touchstone gremlin took the initiative to bring in a spontaneous reference to the author of Beowulf, who surely has excellent qualifications for being mentioned in this thread!

By cecrow's qualifications for this thread, I'd have to go with Joseph Heller and Catch 22. Although some of his other novels were amusing for me, nothing had the power of Yossarian and crew.

I've never thought that William Golding ever came near Lord of the flies with the other titles of his that I've tried.

And of course there's Harper Lee, who knew when to stop.

I was thinking about A Confederacy of Dunces which took a Herculean effort to even get published.

#8> Right. And it was a Herculean effort by his mother after Toole was already dead, so, yeah, another book would have been miraculous. To put it mildly. :-)

LOL! You're right; his first book really doesn't count.

Moral of the story: Persist and don't off-yourself.