I suspect that Afterword bookworms are in a huff.
We’ve had one album wonders and one film wonders . But what about those writers who only produced one magnificent novel?
Here’s your chance to share those neglected masterpieces with us!
As ever, the rules are fairly elastic. If a writer’s publishers have dug up a piece of juvenilia to publish long after the masterpiece, that still counts.
I’m bagsying A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole. Punblished in 1980, 11 years after his suicide.
What one book wnders are on your shelves?
Kerouac ‘On the Road’. I know he wrote more but, really, did anyone read them?
Similarly J.D. Salinger and Truman Capote.
Me sir – seduced by the groovy covers. Can’t remember a thing about them, though…http://i1100.photobucket.com/albums/g401/mikethep/lonesome_zpsmkiuvaq6.jpg
http://i1100.photobucket.com/albums/g401/mikethep/dharma_zpscgmgtds6.jpg
I haven’t read On The Road, but I have read this. (Well, I say read, what I mean is struggled through a few chapters, then gave up).
http://i1366.photobucket.com/albums/r761/salwarpe1/Mobile%20Uploads/kerouac_drsax1980_thumb2_zpsljrfxqog.jpg
Yeah, I tried reading both these too. And failed.
Didn’t Capote famously review ‘On the Road’ by saying ‘that’s not writing…that’s typing’?
Kerouac’s hero Neal Cassady (the real life Dean Moriaty) only wrote one novel, “The First Third”.
I don’t know much about it. Has any Afterworder read it? Is it any good?
…. Who’s Sal then? Perhaps I don’t remember it that well after all. Jack Kerouac? I was confusing him with Jack Warner. “If you’re On The Road at night, mind how you go….”
Capote wrote two masterpieces. Breakfast At Tiffany’s and In Cold Blood.
I recommend his short story The Grass Harp too. It’s a while since I read it but think it would appeal to anyone who enjoyed the kids and location aspects of To Kill a Mockingbird.
I made a point of reading OTR when I was sixteen. I thought it was great. I can still remember bits of it, like Sal Moriarty’s car-parking skills and the description of a jazz gig (bebop, one assumes). He made that life seem attractive, though at the same time it’s pretty unsentimental.
I thought the 2012 film of On The Road was really, really bad.
The film Kill Your Darlings, with Harry Potter as Allen Ginsberg and someone else as Jack Kerouac, was quite good though
I’ve read all of Salinger’s published works. Catcher In The Rye is the least of them. For Esme with Love and Squalor is a fantastic book.
Lightning Eddie! Nano seconds after I’ve pressed the Submit button he’s commented! I’m impressed!
Fast, but inaccurate it seems.
If I can include non-fiction, there are these two, both from writers who drank themselves to an early grave.
The Gallery by John Horne Burns, it’s a novel about the war in Algiers and Naples, taken from different perspectives, the GIs and locals. It can seem quite odd in places, quite impressionistic but still an extraordinary book. Would appeal to the many Naples 44 junkies on this site. The book became very popular after it was finally published and although he wrote other less stellar stuff, nothing to match The Gallery.
Nairn’s London by Ian Nairn. He was an architectural journalist, and although he wrote a lot and did a lot of tv work, nothing quite matches his London guidebook which originally came out in 1966 and has recently been re-issued. His descriptions of buildings and areas is quite unlike anything I have ever read. It’s not often an architectural journalist can make you laugh out loud and his warnings about what was happening in London in 1966 were amazingly prescient. He was a connoisseur of pub life and his descriptions of pubs are hilarious and still true today. It’s a wonderful book.
Point of order: Ian Nairn also published Nairn’s Paris, just as wonderfully opinionated.
Oops, quite right. Never read it, that’s my excuse. If it’s as good as London, will look out for it though.
Thanks Dodger. Will look out for those.
This should interest you and Mike. You’ve probably seen it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eQBBBj_1wwI
Indeed so KFD, really good programme.
Harper Lee – To Kill a Mockingbird – of course only until July
Robert Tresswell – Ragged Trousered Philanthropist
Harry Thompson – This Thing of Darkness
perhaps there’s a separate list for authors who should have only written one novel….
Small correction: Robert “Tressell” was the Ragged Trousered Philanthropists Hitmaker. I’m struggling through it for my book group at the moment.
Thanks, should have googled it before I typed it..read it ages ago and remembered being impressed by it but that it does “lay it on with a trowel”
I think that could be right. It’s said that everyone has one book in them, and that does seem to be true of a lot of writers of fiction. They say everything they have to say early in their careers, although not necessarily their first book, and the rest seems to be either reworking this or unsuccessfully trying out new genres. Lucky Jim, The Spy who came in from the Cold, and A House for Mr Biswas so brilliantly express what their authors had to say, that maybe it’s inevitable that they couldn’t match them.
Perhaps the ultimate one book writer was Proust, who realised that anything he wrote would be a variation on his great theme, and so decided to put it all into one book – even if it’s on a colossal scale.
Joseph Heller. I’m sure he’s written something other than Catch-22, but did anyone read them?
“Something Happened” was the follow-up. One of the most bleak, depressing books I’ve ever started. I abandoned it in a fog of despair after about the second chapter.
Yes, Something Happened was truly depressing. I’ve read one called Good As Gold, but can’t remember a single thing about it.
Charles Baudelaire.
Yes, I know he wrote lots of art criticism and literary criticism and a few other stray bits and pieces that no one cares about, but essentially Baudelaire’s mighty reputation as one of the greatest poets in the history of the French language rests solely on one solitary collection of poetry: Les Fleurs du Mal.
Joseph Heller? You jest, surely?
‘Good as Gold’ and ‘Something Happened’ are both excellent books. Heller may not have managed to match the towering achievements of ‘Catch 22’, but very few writers ever will.
Emily Bronte. She wuthered then withered.
Mary Shelley too, I think. She unbound Prometheus then bounded off.
Me too. A brilliant man, if a bit of a pain in the arse, by all accounts.
Very witty, Pencil!
Not sure now who was a brilliant man but a pain in the arse.
Nairn, Baudelaire, Heller or Emily Bronte. The latter would cast a very interesting slant on Bronte research.
The pain in the arse was Ian Nairn. The system let me down.
Anne Frank
In Jen Campbell’s amusing “Weird things customers say in bookshops” there is an anecdote about someone who asks whether there Ms Frank wrote a sequel!
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry wrote some other books but is doubtless best known for The Little Prince.
He died in a WW2 plane crash on a reconnaissance mission from North Africa and has enormous literary status in France
Ironic then that Lyon airport is named Saint-Exupery?
Deeply ironic.
Reminds me of that Australian politician who died tragically in a drowning accident.
How did they commemorate his memory? They named a swimming pool after him!
Henry Roth nearly did it – he wrote Call It Sleep and didn’t follow it up for 60 odd years.
Did Robert M Pirsig ever follow up Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance? I loved that when I was a yout’. I think it’s been forgotten now.
He published another book called Lila some time around 1990. At the time he confidently claimed it would be remembered as his great work.
Don’t they always. Authors and rock stars. “This is the best thing I’ve ever done”. Joe Public: “It ain’t, you deluded putz”
Lila – it was good – more in the same vein as Zen, albeit updated for the computer age – lots of metaphors about hardware and software and programming, I recall
I love Zen, but because I read first, young. Lila is just as thought provoking.
Have another one for you KFD. The Guernsey and literary potato pee pie society by Mary Ann Shaffer. It’s a very charming novel and did very well. It’s based in Guernsey under occupation and I really enjoyed it. I’m not sure if she ever lived to see it published, it came out the same year she died.
Thanks Dodger. Will look out for that!
Quite a story behind it too.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Guernsey_Literary_and_Potato_Peel_Pie_Society
Sylvia Plath was primarily a poet but also wrote one brilliant novel, The Bell Jar. And it’s on my shelf.
Celine has written books other than “Journey To The End Of The Night” but no one cares. Likewise Henry Miller and “Tropic Of Cancer.” However I read them both in my early twenties and only dimly remember them.
A real one book wonder is Ralph Ellison. “Invisible Man” is a masterpiece, just wonderful and for the rest of his life nothing.
I have no idea of Lermontov wrote anything other than “A Hero Of Our Time” but he didn’t need to.
Sicilian one book wonder “Il Gattopardo” (The Leopard) by di Lampedusa hasn’t been mentioned as far as I can see. I read it a very long time ago, but IIRC it’s very good.
Alain-Fournier’s ‘The Wanderer’ would seem to fit the only-novel criterion, as well as the utterly fantastic book criterion.
That bloke who wrote The Beach … Alex Garland? Did he ever do anything else?
He did, read a hyped sequel (forget the title). Not as good and sank without a trace. I think he’s involved in screenwriting now.
The Tesseract? Read it, can’t remember it.
The Tesseract was pretty good, I thought. There was another book after, called The Coma, that was one of those short novels padded out with illustrations. He is very much in the film business now – wrote, amongst others, 28 Days Later and last years Dredd movie, and recently directed Ex Machina, which had some very good reviews.
Is Ex Machina based on the comic books? Decent source material if so.
Don’t think so (haven’t read them). It’s about someone meeting a developing AI in a female body, if that helps
There’s a great sci-fi novel, originally a short story, written in the epistolary style called Flowers For Algernon by Daniel Keyes who, as far as I can tell, only wrote that one novel sometime in the 60s. The main character is of low mental intelligence and IQ but then is given a drug that raises his intelligence to a genius level. As a consequence of his new-found intellect virtually all his relationships deteriorate. Eventually the process fails and he reverts to his previous level of intelligence but is haunted by the memory of what he had become. It was adapted into a film called Charly for which Cliff Robertson bagged the Best Actor Oscar.
Prog fans may like to know that Tont Banks’ A Curious Feeling was inspired by the short story.
I’ve been meaning to read it for a few months. It was one of those things that appeared on my radar and ever since I keep seeing references to it.
It’s very good. It made my cry; but I would thoroughly recommend it.
Never bothered with sci-fi stuff, but that sounds good & will give it a go. I seem to remember bits of the film. Bisto’s recommendations have never previously disappointed me.
Flowers For Algernon is a beautiful, very moving book. I loved the idea that, having gained and lost great intelligence, those around him are as touched by the change as he is. One of those books that I think transcends genre.
Homeboy by Janis Joplin’s former boyfriend, Seth Morgan
“Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up to Me” (1966) by Richard Fariña, husband of Mimi Fariña, who died in a motorcycle crash at the age of 29.
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert Pirsig. Not strictly his only novel but considering it’s cultural impact very little was to follow. His only other tome which I know of Lila: An Inquiry Into Morals was published 17 years later. I think ‘Zen’ is an amazing book – a metaphysical journey via motorcycles.
This thread is turning into a rather fine slow-burner. Lots of fine books I’ve never heard of.
Doctor Zhivago was Pasternak’s only novel.
As was Black Beauty by Anna Sewell.
Stoker, Bram
Dracula
The obvious answer (other than the other obvious answers listed above) surely has to be Margaret Mitchell’s “Gone With The Wind”, if only in terms of total sales over the years. While it’s not the literary equivalent of ‘Birth Of A Nation’ it is perhaps guilty of painting a somewhat roseate picture of the Antebellum South. Not the worst book I ever read, mind you…
Some my book circle pals are enormous fans of Fournier’s only novel, Meaulnes the Great.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Le_Grand_Meaulnes