Whether it was an untimely death, lack of success or specializing in another format, here are 11 Famous Authors who only wrote one novel.
11 Famous Authors Who Only Wrote One Novel
Boris Pasternak
Boris Pasternak, the Nobel Prize winning Russian poet and author, surprisingly only wrote one novel, albeit a classic in Doctor Zhivago. And it was so poorly received at home the manuscript was smuggled out of Russia and published in Italy in 1957.
Reportedly Doctor Zhivago was based on his own true love, Pasternak passed away in 1960, never publishing another novel.
Emily Bronte
The English literature classic Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte was published in 1847 under her pseudonym Ellis Bell. Tragically Emily died the following year from tuberculosis, only 30 years old. She was middle of the three ‘Bronte’ sisters with Anne, the youngest, famous for The Tenant of Wildfell Hall and the oldest Charlotte Brontë, author of Jane Eyre.
Whilst Emily was also an accomplished poet, she will be remembered for Wuthering Heights, a passionate novel of doomed love, propriety, and tragedy.
Ralph Ellison
Ralph Ellison wrote the award winning novel Invisible Man in 1952. It was to be his only completed novel published in his lifetime. A noted perfectionist he wasn’t satisfied with either the Invisible Man or his second novel, which at the time of his death amounted to 2000 pages and was unpublished.
Katherine Anne Porter
The idea for Ship of Fools originated in a voyage that she took from Mexico to Europe in 1931. Some of the passengers she encountered on the ship became the models for the characters in Ship of Fools. Porter began work on the novel in 1941 and it took her twenty years to complete. Published in 1962, it was hugely successful and spawned a movie adaption. However critical opinion of the book was less unanimous and to this day opinion is split on it’s merits. It was to be her only novel.
Margaret Mitchell
Margaret Mitchell penned the enormously popular novel Gone With the Wind in 1936. The novel earned Mitchell a National Book Award and a Pulitzer Prize, and it was the source of the classic film of the same name released in 1939. Such was the success of the novel, and given Mitchell’s dislike of the spotlight she didn’t consider writing again until 1948 shortly before her death.
Oscar Wilde
Oscar Wilde’s only full-length novel, published in 1891, is the tale of a portrait that ages and decays as its model remains ever young and beautiful. Dorian Gray, a naive and irresistible young man, is lured by decadent Lord Henry Wotton into a life of depravity. Dorian becomes steeped in sin, but his face remains perfect, unlined – while only his portrait, locked away, reveals the blackness of his soul.
Wilde was a successful playwright and poet who died at the age of 46.
Theresa Hak Kyung Cha
“Dictee,” the Korean American writer and artist Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s masterpiece, was published in 1982. Part memoir, part history, Dictee is a challenging innovative exploration of Cha’s life, her mother’s difficult immigrant journey across East Asia and to the United States, the fractured immigrant experience, women warriors, and language itself
Just as it was released, Cha was raped and killed by a security guard in New York. She was 31 years old.
Harper Lee
Winner of the 1961 Pulitzer Prize, To Kill a Mockingbird was the hugely successful debut novel by Harper Lee. Although she did help her friend Truman Capote with the writing of In Cold Blood in 1967, she disliked the spotlight and never published another novel.
Shortly before her death in 2016, an uncovered manuscript Go Set a Watchman was published amidst some controversy, charitably it could be described as an earlier draft of To Kill a Mockingbird, but shouldn’t distract from the masterpiece of the original.
J.D Salinger
J.D. Salinger was a literary giant despite his slim body of work and reclusive lifestyle. His controversial landmark novel, The Catcher in the Rye, set a new course for literature in post-WW2 America and vaulted Salinger to the heights of literary fame. Whilst he only published one novel, his short stories, many of which appeared in The New Yorker, inspired the early careers of writers such as Phillip Roth, John Updike and Harold Brodkey. In 1953, Salinger moved from New York City to a farm in Cornish, New Hampshire and led a secluded life, only publishing one new story before his death in 2010.
Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa
Giuseppe di Lampedusa wrote only one novel, The Leopard, and a few short pieces before his death in 1957, but ever since, his reputation has been growing with readers around the world. Set in the 1860s, The Leopard is the spellbinding story of a decadent, dying Sicilian aristocracy threatened by the approaching forces of democracy and revolution.
Anton Chekhov
The Shooting Party is a story of concealed love and fatal jealousy wrapped into a classic murder mystery and is Chekhov’s only novel.
When a young woman dies during a shooting party at the country estate of a dissolute count, a magistrate is called to investigate. But suspicion descends upon virtually everyone, for, as we soon learn, the victim was at the center of a tangled web of relationships with her elderly husband, with the lecherous count, and with the magistrate himself. One of Anton Chekhov’s earliest experiments in fiction, The Shooting Party prefigures the mature style he would develop in his later short stories and plays.
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