Folks with limited time and limited financial resources often hit upon the idea of building a private library around an author who is known to have penned but a single book--Harper Lee or Margaret Mitchell, for example. Their thinking usually is that this will make it a lot easier to build a nice, perhaps even important, private library about their chosen author, since they won't have to buy as many books to complete their author collection as they would with a more prolific author like, e.g., Joyce Carol Oates or --heaven forbid!--Shakespeare.
The extent to which this line of thought is credible very much depends on the author. The more influential an author's single work, the less likely it is that such a notion will be viable. Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird, for example, has generated a vast body of criticism, not to mention numerous reprints of the novel itself. All of this necessitates far more shelf space than will ever be required for the reprints and criticism generated by your typical multiple-title author of genre westerns:
One often finds that while an author may have penned only a single book, his or her literary efforts in other forms (short stories for magazines, let's say) require a substantial amount of shelf space of their own, especially if these other literary works were influential. Ralph Ellison comes to mind, being almost as well known for his essays (later collected in book form) as for his single novel The Invisible Man.
It is not at all uncommon for a novice book collector to discover, upon doing a little research into his or her favorite author, that while one's author may be best known for a single book, that book not only was not the only book one's author wrote ... it was not even the best book that one's author wrote.
A notable example of this is J. D. Salinger, whose death this past Wednesday at age 91 brought into focus for a new generation of readers that Catcher in the Rye was by no means his only novel, or even his best novel (many critics reserve that accolade for his 1961 book Franny and Zooey, which originally had been published separately as a short story and a novella in 1955 and 1957, respectively).
Most authentic one-book authors, though, not only have little influence, but often fall into undeserved obscurity. The Lost Books Club is trying to bring the more deserving back into the limelight, as a reminder that--as David Ulin so eloquently puts it--sometimes all you need is one burst of brilliance to illuminate an otherwise ordinary (or even catastrophic) life....
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