![]() ![]() John Carey seems to allude to the category in this biography’s subtitle (even though Carey eventually disputes the implication). ![]() Salinger, Ralph Ellison, Joseph Heller - to cite only the 20th-century American exemplars - but such one-book writers are legion in all literatures. What is it like to owe virtually your entire reputation as a writer to a single book? One thinks of J. Golding was drinking heavily at the time (he had a lifelong struggle with alcoholism) and one may have to take his bitterness advisedly, but these remarks reveal an interesting artistic conundrum. In the late 1960s, some 15 years after the publication of “Lord of the Flies,” William Golding confessed to a friend that he resented the novel because it meant that he owed his reputation to what he thought of as a minor book, a book that had made him a classic in his lifetime, which was “a joke,” and that the money he had gained from it was “Monopoly money” because he hadn’t really earned it. ![]()
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