10 Literary One Hit Wonders, 10 Spectacular Second Novels, 10 Cursed Second Novels

From The Times
March 17, 2009
10 Literary one-hit wonders
Luke Leitch looks at those authors for whom one novel proved quite enough

Harper Lee - To Kill a Mockingbird

“I never expected any sort of success with [To Kill a] Mockingbird. I was hoping for a quick and merciful death at the hands of reviewers, but at the same time I hoped that maybe someone would like it enough to give me encouragement - public encouragement. I got rather a whole lot, and in some ways this was just about as frightening as the quick, merciful death I'd expected.”

Margaret Mitchell - Gone With the Wind

Margaret Mitchell wrote Gone With The Wind in secret and gave it to an editor only after a colleague laughed at the idea of her writing a novel. It won a Pulitzer, inspired that film and sold tens of millions of copies. She died in 1949 in a car accident, on the way to the cinema.

Emily Bronte - Wuthering Heights

Wuthering Heights is suddenly popular among French teenagers who have discovered Le Yorkshire thanks to the 21st-century vampire novels of Stephenie Meyer, which reference Bronte. Emily died of TB, the year after the publication of her only novel in 1847.

J.D.Salinger - Catcher in the Rye

Salinger is a member of the one-hit-wonder club only if you consider Franny and Zooey, published in 1961, as a novella. Salinger's last published work, a short story, appeared in The New Yorker in 1965.

Oscar Wilde - The Picture of Dorian Gray

“Every portrait that is painted with feeling is a portrait of the artist, not of the sitter.” Three of the characters in Wilde's only novel The Picture of Dorian Gray were based on Wilde himself. It was a little too racy for the critics of the times, and Wilde stuck with plays, poetry and short stories until his death a decade later.

John Kennedy Toole - A Confederacy of Dunces

The author committed suicide in 1969, having given up hope of seeing his comic masterpiece in print. Eventually it was published in 1980. A "second novel", The Neon Bible, followed in 1989 - but this was actually written by Toole as a teenager and, as an adult, rejected as juvenilia.

Sylvia Plath - The Bell Jar

Published under a pseudonym, The Bell Jar's protagonist, Esther Greenwood, suffers a psychological breakdown while working as in an intern for a New York fashion magazine. She attempts suicide, receives therapy and steps back towards stability. Plath committed suicide in 1963, the year of the book's publication.

Anna Sewell - Black Beauty

Anna Sewell's mother was a children's author but Sewell began her first novel aged 51. Black Beauty took six years to write and was intended, Sewell said, to encourage humane treatment of horses. She died in 1878, five months after its publication.

Boris Pasternak - Dr Zhivago

The manuscript of Dr Zhivago was smuggled out of Soviet Russia, published in Italy, and won Pasternak the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1958. He accepted but was then pressured to decline the prize. He died of lung cancer in 1960.

Arundhati Roy - The God of Small Things

After her debut novel The God of Small Things won the Booker Prize, the Indian writer turned to nonfiction writing and political activism. In 2007 she announced that she was returning to fiction. After a ten-year hiatus, the stakes will be higher than ever before - if Roy ever finishes her sophomore effort, it will be a triumph of will over the dreaded Second Novel Syndrome.

From The Times
March 17, 2009
10 Spectacular second novels
Luke Leitch rounds up the most successul literary sequels ever

Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen

Recently ranked Britain's second most loved book (after The Lord of The Rings) Pride and Prejudice was published in 1813, two years after Sense and Sensibility. Its original title was First Impressions.

Ulysses - James Joyce

Joyce's debut, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, though brilliantly executed, was an archetypal first novel - a barely disguised autobiographal coming-of-age yarn. Ulysses was something else entirely.

Midnight's Children- Salman Rushdie

The recent winner of the Booker of Booker's, Midnight's Children is often cited as a first novel. The reason is that Grimus, published in 1975, was so poorly received that barely anyone remembered it.

Vile Bodies - Evelyn Waugh

Less studied and autobiographical - and much funnier - than Decline and Fall, Waugh's first, with which Vile Bodies shares some characters. A sure step upwards towards the heights of Scoop and Brideshead Revisited.

Oliver Twist -Charles Dickens

Published in serial form after The Pickwick Papers but, composed simultaneously to it, and then - once Pickwick was complete - at the same time as Nicholas Nickleby.

Girl With a Pearl Earring -Tracy Chevalier

Not unlike Rushdie, in that Chevalier's first novel, The Virgin Blue made little impact; 12,000 copies were pulped. Chevalier later said in an interview: “Now that edition is a collector's item. Heh.”

The Golden Notebook - Doris Lessing

Texts layered within text Anna Wulf's notebooks touched on everything from the fear of nuclear annihilation to institutional sexism of the 1960s. A regular on post-modern literature reading lists - a wonderful read nonetheless.

Life of Pi - Yann Martel

After two collections of short stories and a novel, Self, Martel's Life of Pi won the Booker and survived a controversy about its similarity to a book by Brazilian author Moacyr Scliar.

The Beautiful and Damned - F.Scott Fitzgerald

He confirmed the reputation won with This Side of Paradise two years earlier. The Beautiful and Damned was the Jazz Age chronicler's first great novel, published by Scribner (who will publish Audrey Niffenegger's second) in 1922. His third was The Great Gatsby.

The Mill on the Floss by George Eliot

Eliot (real name Mary Ann Evans) published Adam Bede in 1859, and although her rural tragedy was praised by critics and fellow authors, including Charles Dickens, it is her second novel that became a set text, and the standard-bearer for Victorian social realism.

From The Times
March 17, 2009
10 Cursed second novels
Luke Leitch looks at the writers who couldn't quite match their initial success

Something Happened- Joseph Heller

Thirteen years after Catch-22, Something Happened won critical acclaim but failed to capture the public imagination as its predecessor had.

The Almost Moon- Alice Sebold

The Lovely Bones was 2002's must-read. Five years later the critics rounded on The Almost Moon. The New York Times called it “so morally, emotionally and intellectually incoherent that it's bound to become a bestseller”. Miaow.

Barbary Shore- Norman Mailer

A novel about a Brooklyn novelist, Mailer's return to America from the war setting of The Naked and the Dead was as abortive as Heller's.

The Little Friend- Donna Tartt

The Secret History, an overtly intellectual whodunnit and college coming-of-age story that drew much (murder apart) from Bennington, Tartt's alma mater. The Little Friend was another exhaustive murder mystery, but critics and readers were not beguiled.

Marabou Stork Nightmares - Irvine Welsh

How do you follow Trainspotting? With more of the same, not nearly as good.

Thirteen Moons - Charles Frazier

Frazier's Cold Mountain sold in bucketloads and he received an $8million advance for Thirteen Moons. It flopped.

Shirley- Charlotte Bronte

Published two years after Jane Eyre, Shirley's most enduring impact is that, until publication, Shirley was a rare name - and a boy's name at that. But Bronte's Shirley was female - and now most Shirleys are too.

Valperga- Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley

Shelley was 18 when she wrote Frankenstein, the most famous gothic novel in literature and, some say, the first science-fiction novel. Valperga, or The Life and Adventures of Castruccio, Prince of Lucca, a historical novel, received polite reviews and was never republished in her lifetime.

Walking on Glass- Iain Banks

The Wasp Factory was hailed as one of the 100th best books of the 20th century. Walking on Glass was dismissed as a confusing dog's dinner.

Dead Babies by Martin Amis and That Uncertain Feeling by Kingsley Amis

The first novels from Amis Senior and Junior sent shock-waves through the literary establishments of their days. Their sophomore efforts sent feeble ripples.