There are some sites that I will only link to in extremis, because the site-pages are so annoyingly busy, or otherwise so unpleasant to deal with/navigate that regardless of the content I'd rather not send readers there; The Huffington Post is a case in point -- in particular, because it actually occasionally has content that would otherwise be of sufficient interest for me to direct you there.
Here, however, is a case where it is the abysmal quality of the content of a piece that leads me to mention and link to it, an instance of such lazy and shoddy work that I can't keep myself from venting.
I like a list -- a literary list, especially -- as much as the next person (though I probably loathe lists-presented-in-slideshow-format even more than the next person ...), and, of course, lists abound on internet; just yesterday Mark O'Connell wrote about the phenomenon, in 10 Paragraphs About Lists You Need In Your Life Right Now at The New Yorker's Page-Turner weblog.
It's gotten to the point that the list has to be something pretty compelling for me to even bother to have a look -- but claims of an Ultimate List Of Literary One Hit Wonders, such as found at The Huffington Post yesterday, can still pique my interest -- I've seen lists of literary one-hit wonders before, after all, but this one promises to be the ultimate one; if true, I wouldn't ever need to bother with any more of these .....
They actually have a parenthetical caveat, explaining that they don't solely mean one-offs (like the inevitable top choice for this and all similarly-themed lists, Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird):
Anyway, here we have a list that includes, for example, Upton Sinclair's The Jungle -- sure, his most lasting (in terms of influence and how often it is assigned for classroom reading) work -- but Sinclair wrote many dozens of other books -- and guess what ? a lot of them were pretty damn successful. Take the Lanny Budd-series -- almost a dozen titles right there, which sold very well, thank you.
Then there's All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque -- the point at which I completely lost it. Sure, that's his biggest hit -- but Remarque was one of the bestselling novelists of the 1920s through 1940s, worldwide: as this convenient year-by-year listing of the top ten bestselling works of fiction in the US for the 20th century shows, The Road Back was one of the bestselling titles of 1931, Arch of Triumph a top-ten seller in 1946. By any definition these were 'hits' -- much bigger hits than some of the one-hit wonders they list, at least sales-wise.
The piece also claims: Joseph "Heller's only notable novel was Catch-22." Funny, then, that Catch-22 -- admittedly a perennial (lower-level) bestseller -- was not an overnight sales-sensation: it did not rank among the year's top ten when it came out. You know what did ? Heller's Something Happened, in 1974.
So again, by their own criteria, they're ignoring bona fide 'popular' books -- just because they apparently haven't heard of them, or couldn't be bothered to do the least bit of research.
Other lowlights: "No one has ever heard of another novel she wrote, we don't think", about Mary Shelley and Frankenstein (hey, I enjoyed The Last Man ...); they admit Milan Kundera: "published other fiction" but think The Unbearable Lightness of Being is his one-hit wonder; they include Milton (!). Oh, yes, and they list one of the one-hit wonders as: "A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Tool" [sic]; it's pretty clear who the tools here are .....
As it turns out, a lot of these titles figure on older lists, too -- including a variation from The Huffington Post from just a few years ago, The 12 Greatest Literary One-Hit Wonders (with a few mind-boggling alternate selections -- though the "Ultimate' list easily has this one beat). Others lists can be found at Listverse, The Telegraph, More, and Mental Floss. There are some very debatable selections on these too -- but this 'Ultimate' one really seems to take the cake.
I get that it's hard to decide what makes a 'hit' in the definition of one-hit wonder. Harper Lee is easy, since there's just the one -- but when an author has written several or many books it gets more complicated. The Huffington Post list seems to consider just current sales and reputation (and they aren't even on very solid footing there); the fact that they have no sense at all of popular literary history (like the fact that Remarque was beyond huge, and not just for the one title) dooms this particular exercise.
I know it's late in the summer, and presumably I shouldn't be surprised by such lazy-ass filler pieces (for which, tellingly, no one seems to be willing to take credit ...). But pretty much zero effort went into this thing, from the selection of the books to the editing. Obviously there was nothing resembling fact-checking (including of authors' names ...).
Pathetic.
Sadly, this list is the 'ultimate' only in a very different sense from which they mean it .....
I like a list -- a literary list, especially -- as much as the next person (though I probably loathe lists-presented-in-slideshow-format even more than the next person ...), and, of course, lists abound on internet; just yesterday Mark O'Connell wrote about the phenomenon, in 10 Paragraphs About Lists You Need In Your Life Right Now at The New Yorker's Page-Turner weblog.
It's gotten to the point that the list has to be something pretty compelling for me to even bother to have a look -- but claims of an Ultimate List Of Literary One Hit Wonders, such as found at The Huffington Post yesterday, can still pique my interest -- I've seen lists of literary one-hit wonders before, after all, but this one promises to be the ultimate one; if true, I wouldn't ever need to bother with any more of these .....
They actually have a parenthetical caveat, explaining that they don't solely mean one-offs (like the inevitable top choice for this and all similarly-themed lists, Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird):
(For the record, by "one hit wonder," we mean books that were actually HITS. They don't just have to be good. They have to be popular. Therefore, some of these authors probably wrote other good books, but they just didn't reach popularity).(Okay, the fact that they put the final period outside the parentheses should have tipped me off that there wasn't much editing going on here, but there's so much wrong with this list that doesn't even rank very high ..... Also: "they just didn't reach popularity" ? Who edits this shit ? I know, I know: nobody. What editors there might be must be on vacation, and they've clearly unleashed some (high school-age ?) interns to fill up the pages.)
Anyway, here we have a list that includes, for example, Upton Sinclair's The Jungle -- sure, his most lasting (in terms of influence and how often it is assigned for classroom reading) work -- but Sinclair wrote many dozens of other books -- and guess what ? a lot of them were pretty damn successful. Take the Lanny Budd-series -- almost a dozen titles right there, which sold very well, thank you.
Then there's All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque -- the point at which I completely lost it. Sure, that's his biggest hit -- but Remarque was one of the bestselling novelists of the 1920s through 1940s, worldwide: as this convenient year-by-year listing of the top ten bestselling works of fiction in the US for the 20th century shows, The Road Back was one of the bestselling titles of 1931, Arch of Triumph a top-ten seller in 1946. By any definition these were 'hits' -- much bigger hits than some of the one-hit wonders they list, at least sales-wise.
The piece also claims: Joseph "Heller's only notable novel was Catch-22." Funny, then, that Catch-22 -- admittedly a perennial (lower-level) bestseller -- was not an overnight sales-sensation: it did not rank among the year's top ten when it came out. You know what did ? Heller's Something Happened, in 1974.
So again, by their own criteria, they're ignoring bona fide 'popular' books -- just because they apparently haven't heard of them, or couldn't be bothered to do the least bit of research.
Other lowlights: "No one has ever heard of another novel she wrote, we don't think", about Mary Shelley and Frankenstein (hey, I enjoyed The Last Man ...); they admit Milan Kundera: "published other fiction" but think The Unbearable Lightness of Being is his one-hit wonder; they include Milton (!). Oh, yes, and they list one of the one-hit wonders as: "A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Tool" [sic]; it's pretty clear who the tools here are .....
As it turns out, a lot of these titles figure on older lists, too -- including a variation from The Huffington Post from just a few years ago, The 12 Greatest Literary One-Hit Wonders (with a few mind-boggling alternate selections -- though the "Ultimate' list easily has this one beat). Others lists can be found at Listverse, The Telegraph, More, and Mental Floss. There are some very debatable selections on these too -- but this 'Ultimate' one really seems to take the cake.
I get that it's hard to decide what makes a 'hit' in the definition of one-hit wonder. Harper Lee is easy, since there's just the one -- but when an author has written several or many books it gets more complicated. The Huffington Post list seems to consider just current sales and reputation (and they aren't even on very solid footing there); the fact that they have no sense at all of popular literary history (like the fact that Remarque was beyond huge, and not just for the one title) dooms this particular exercise.
I know it's late in the summer, and presumably I shouldn't be surprised by such lazy-ass filler pieces (for which, tellingly, no one seems to be willing to take credit ...). But pretty much zero effort went into this thing, from the selection of the books to the editing. Obviously there was nothing resembling fact-checking (including of authors' names ...).
Pathetic.
Sadly, this list is the 'ultimate' only in a very different sense from which they mean it .....