Harper Lee and John Kennedy Toole, we get. But we think Wilde and Salinger are a bit of a reach, even taking the Times's mushy standard into account.
(You can also check out 10 Spectacular Second Novels and 10 Cursed Second Novels.)
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In his recent TEV guest review of Home Land, Jim Ruland called Sam Lipsyte the "funniest writer of his generation," and we're quite inclined to agree. We tore through Home Land in two joyful sittings and can't remember the last time we've laughed so hard. Lipsyte's constellation of oddly sympathetic losers is rendered with a sparkling, inspired prose style that's sent us off in search of all his prior work. In Lewis Miner's (a.k.a Teabag) woeful epistolary dispatches to his high school alumni newsletter ("I did not pan out."), we find an anti-hero for the age. Highly, highly recommended.
The problem with how authors were chosen as "one hit wonders" is that they are only counting novels as possible "hits". This is absurd. Particularly when you take Boris Pasternak into account, whose poetry is a far superior literary achievement (at least in Russian) than the melodramatic potboiler Dr. Zhivago. Great writers often work in more than one literary form, and their "hits" shouldn't be arbitrarily circumscribed to one in the interests of constructing a listicle.
Ditto for Oscar Wilde. If you're not going to count The Importance of Being Earnest in his corner, then there's something crazy about your criteria in the first place.
And some would say that J.D. Salinger is in fact a no-hit wonder.
Posted by: Niall | March 17, 2009 at 03:32 PM
Does Virgil qualify as a one-hit wonder? How about Anthony Powell or Proust? Henry Adams? Milton?
Do the Eclogues and Georgics, The Fisher King, Contre Sainte-Beuve, Democracy, and Samson Agonistes count as hits? (Debate anmongst yourselves.)
Or is this just a stupid conversation?
(But in any case, Jonathan Franzen . . . that schmuck is definitely a one-hit wonder.)
Posted by: Dagger DiGorro | March 17, 2009 at 05:11 PM
And JR doesn't qualify as a Spectacular Second? The Sun Also Rises? Ummm . . . Madame Bovary?
Posted by: Dagger DiGorro | March 17, 2009 at 05:41 PM
What about Homer? The Odyssey inspired Joyce's Ulysses which made the list. Proust and Milton I would definitely have as one-hit wonders, but when the one hit is amongst the greatest in the canon, one-hit wonder isn't really applicable. Besides, In Search of Lost Time is more a cycle of several works. More: Cervantes, Herodotus.
Posted by: DenverScribe | March 17, 2009 at 07:45 PM
I don't think Homer ever copyrighted his work, so the Iliad may not count.
Posted by: Niall | March 18, 2009 at 09:54 AM