One-Hit Literary Wonders
Veronique de Turenne's article on the 50th anniversary of one of the great 20th century American novels, To Kill a Mockingbird, started me thinking once again about some perplexing questions. Why did Harper Lee abandon the much-anticipated second novel that she started in the late 1960s? More importantly, if Lee had finished the book--which may or may not have existed on paper, as Charles Leerhsen details in this Smithsonian piece--would it have been even more masterful than Mockingbird? Or would it have been the literary equivalent of The Two Jakes, the painfully underwhelming 1990 sequel to one the greatest films of the 1970s, Chinatown?
We'll never know the answers to those questions. Maybe they don't really matter. The underlying assumption behind them is that to qualify as a true literary great, an author should produce a body of work that progressively becomes better as his or her talent matures. We've become accustomed to the notion that authors should churn out books. And some certainly have done that. French author Emile Zola's Les Rougon-Macquart, which follows a family through the rise and fall of the Second Empire, is an astonishing 20 books long. And that represents only a portion of his literary output. Elmore Leonard, one of the deans of the American crime novel, has published 44 novels so far, and he's not done yet.
But it's a mistake to confuse prolific output with virtuosity. Mystery thriller manufacturer James Patterson--who these days maximizes his output by employing other writers to flesh out his ideas on paper--is popular but it's unlikely people will remember his work another decade from now. (Patterson's approach first was perfected by Edward Stratemeyer, the late 19th-early 20th century creator of the Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew.)
No, Harper Lee may have been right to quit while she was ahead. (As she once reportedly told her cousin Dickie Williams, "When you're at the top, there is only one way to go.") It may well be that some authors only have one great book in them, and maybe we should be grateful for the lone masterpiece, rather than bemoaning the lack of sequels. I can think of these excellent examples of one-hit literary wonders:
1. John Kennedy Toole, who wrote the comic masterpiece A Confederacy of Dunces and then took his life in 1969 after he was unable to get it published. Fortunately, his mother convinced Walker Percy to take a look at it, and it was posthumously published in 1980. Otherwise, the world never would have experienced the perverse legend-in-his-own-mind Ignatius Reilly, one of the most hysterical characters ever to grace the page.
2.Margaret Mitchell, who took a decade to complete her 1936 Reconstruction epic, Gone with the Wind, as Orson Welles used to remind us in those wine commercials. She stepped in front of a speeding driver on the way to see a movie in 1949, precluding the possibility that she would ever produce another book.
3. Ralph Ellison, whose 1953 masterpiece of magic realism, Invisible Man, is an insightful book on the peculiarities of American race relations. Ellison wrote plenty of worthy essays about jazz music and other subjects, but his uncompleted second novel reportedly perished in a 1967 fire, and he never attempted another.
4. Ross Lockridge, Jr., author of another expansive Southern epic, 1948's Raintree County. Suffering from depression, he committed suicide shortly after its publication.
5. Sylvia Plath,author of the 1963 semi-autobiographical novel The Bell Jar. Her short, tragic life has become as legendary as her work.
6. Emily Brontë, who died in 1848 of tuberculosis, a year after the publication of her only novel, the innovative Wuthering Heights.
7. Boris Pasternak, a Russian poet and literary translator whose disillusionment with Soviet authoritarianism--and his own attempts to conform to it--led to the immense achievement of Doctor Zhivago. The book was published in the West in 1957, to the infuriation of Soviet authorities. Pasternak became the only one-hit winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature two years before his death from lung cancer in 1960.
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Comments:
Take a look at a lovely article, "Looking for Harper Lee, written by Mark Childress in 1997. In it, he cites an excerpt from the book that may hint at a reason Lee herself chose relative reclusiveness: "When Jem declares that there are four kinds of folks in this world, Scout counters that there's really just one. Then Jem asks the unanswerable question: "If there's just one kind of folks, why can't they get along with each other? If they're all alike, why do they go out of their way to despise each other? Scout . . . I think I'm beginning to understand why Boo Radley's stayed shut up in the house all this time . . . it's because he wants to stay inside." I happened to teach "Mockingbird" to 10th graders last fall, reminding me that the book is nothing short of a miracle. If I wrote such a masterpiece, I might be tempted to stop right there, too... as opposed to making a blunder like, say, Sue Monk Kidd, who followed up "Secret Life of Bees" with a self-congratulatory mother-daughter book that wandered nowhere. Or like that "Sixth Sense" writer-director who has made clunkers ever since.
Excellent suggestion. "The Leopard" contains what has to be one of the best single lines of dialogue in literature: " If we want things to stay as they are, things will have to change."
Cowboyhero tweeted that John Kennedy Toole isn't a one-hit wonder. It is true that a second book, "The Neon Bible," was published after the success of "A Confederacy of Dunces." But I'm not counting that as a legitimate second novel. Toole wrote it when he was 16, mostly as a writing exercise, and he never wanted it to be published. His mother, who had campaigned to get "Confederacy" into bookstores, didn't want "The Neon Bible" to be published, either, and it didn't get into print until after her death.
That's a very good point. There are a lot of authors like that, I think. Sometimes, they keep writing the same novel, over and over. On the other hand, there are some novelists who keep covering the same terrain, but who able again and again to find something new to say about it. George Pelecanos, who writes crime novels set in Washington DC and suburban Maryland, is an excellent example. I've lived in that area for years, and yet every time I read one of his books, I see it in a new way, and learn about something that I didn't know. http://www.hachettebookgroup.com/features/georgepelecanos/
I wonder whatever happened to Michael Herr? That was one of the truly great nonfiction books of all time. Another Vietnam book, John Sack's "M," was pretty amazing, too. I think Sack did eventually write another nonfiction book a few years ago.
There's also the syndrome of "one story, many books." Eileen Chang, author of Lust, Caution and Love in a Fallen City, is a case in point. Her story was about a rebellious woman raised in traditional China navigating the liberating nightmare of wartime China. Everything she wrote wrestled with this struggle. I think many, if not most serious writers, succumb to this syndrome. That may be why so many writers flame out when they exhaust their abiding subject.
I nominate Michael Herr for Dispatches. Okay, it's a "nonfiction novel," but it's definitely a wonder. Wasn't Catcher in the Rye J.D. Salinger's only full-length novel?. If so, he has got to be on the list. Great post, Pat. As usual.
How about Giuseppe di Lampedusa's posthumous "The Leopard"; except for "Wuthering Heights" a better novel than any that you have listed.
"Pasternak became the only one-hit winner of the Novel Prize for Literature" I assume you mean "Nobel" .. or it really would be a novel prize, I'd never heard of it.
In retrospect, I probably should clarify: When I say "one-hit wonder," I mean novelists who never produced a sequel to their lone masterpiece of a novel. The term is a reference to the popular VH1 series about flash-in-the-pan pop stars from the 1980s, and it's meant to be tongue-in-cheek. Obviously, I'm not equating Boris Pasternak and Ralph Ellison with, say, Dexy's Midnight Runners or a-ha. (Though to be rigorously accurate, a-ha actually had two hit singles.) :)
True, but again, it's not a second novel, which is what everyone expected from Ellison. Including him.
With all respect, you're incorrect on both counts. Regardless of how one regards her work as a poet--and I've always been partial to "Daddy," ever since I read it in a college English class in the 1970s--it is indisputable that Sylvia Plath wrote only one novel. As for Ellison, As for Ellison, here's what his biographer, Arnold Rampersad, had to say: Ellison's triumph in 1952 also led to a tangled mess of fears and doubts about his ability to finish a second novel at least as fine as Invisible Man. By the time of his death in 1994, his failure to produce that second novel had made Ellison, a proud man, the butt of surreptitious jokes and cruel remarks. The snickering and giggling behind his back often left him prickly and tart, if not downright hostile." Ellison did produce a massive, meandering stack of more than 2,000 pages of material, which his wife gave to the couple's friend, John Callahan, after Ellison's death. Callahan edited and reworked that material into the book eventually published in 1999 as "Juneteenth." As New York Times reviewer Michiko Kakutani wrote, however, "Juneteenth" is not really the novel that Ellison envisioned, but rather something assembled from its parts: "The resulting book provides the reader with intimations of the grand vision animating Ellison's 40-year project, but it also feels disappointingly provisional and incomplete. Given all the cutting and tidying up Callahan has done, the book's opaqueness and attenuation come as little surprise: after all, he has effectively changed the book's entire structure and modus operandi. Instead of the symphonic work Ellison envisioned, Callahan has given us a single, tentatively rendered melodic line. Instead of a vast modernist epic about the black experience in America, he has given us a flawed linear novel, focused around one man's emotional and political evolution."
I have, in fact, read "Invisible Man," though I concede that magic realism isn't really the right genre in which to place it. It's actually a big more surrealistic, in that plausible events morph into fantastical, almost hallucinogenic, metaphorical ones. The chapter in which the protagonist, as a teenager, goes to give his valediction speech to a group of white businessmen and instead is forced to fight with other black youths blindfolded is a good example of that (though apparently, that barbaric entertainment actually sometimes was staged in the late 19th century and early 20th century South.) Similarly, his equipping of his apartment with 1,346 light bulbs so that he is constantly illuminated in blinding light has a surrealistic quality.
Not true regarding Ellison: His collection of essays, "Shadow and Act," is considered a landmark of cultural criticism, and has remained in print continually since its original 1964 publication.
Ralph Ellison is still a one-hit wonder. He only had one successful book. That's the definition. Ah Ha might have released 24 records, but we only remember that one "Take Me On" song.
there is nothing about Invisible Man that makes it magical realism. you obviously haven't read the book
There are only seven items on this list and two of them are wrong. "The Bell Jar" was the only novel Sylvia Plath ever wrote, but that's because she was a poet, and a hugely influential one. Hardly a one-hit wonder. Ralph Ellison absolutely attempted another novel -- several, in fact. He just didn't finish any of them before he died. The most complete manuscript was published as "Juneteenth."