Famous Authors Who Wrote Only One Book ! " Let us remember : One book , one pen , one child , and one teacher can change the world . "

Malala Yousafzai .

It is so overwhelming to see as an individual , each one of us has multitudes of bent up expression, waiting inside of us to burst and spread its fervour amongst the world . One of such expression is the flair in writing , our age has so proudly witnessed great literary work by famous and some not so famous authors in the past , this article aims to bring out few such great authors who only published one book in their lifetime !

1. Boris Pasternak

Boris Pasternak , was a stalwart in twentieth-century poetry . His father was a famous pianist and an artist . He was born in Moscow in 1890 and briefly pursued music and philosophy before devoting his life to literature .

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His greatest work , Doctor Zhivago which is a epic love story staged between the Russian Revolution in 1905 and the Civil War . The book was refused publication in the Soviet Union and later was smuggled to Milan and published in 1957. The following year , Pasternak was awarded Nobel Prize for Literature for the masterpiece .

2. Oscar Wlide

Oscar Wilde has written ten plays , many poems , several short stories and essays but only one novel , The picture of Dorian Grey . The novel was published in 1890 and was Wilde's major literary work as he died in 1990 .

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3. J.D. Salinger

Salinger published few short stories in The New Yorker after which he amassed incredible success with his novel , The Catcher in the Rye in 1951 . He later lived life of a recluse and didn't come up with any major literary work until his death in 2010 .

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4. Sylvia Plath

Plath only wrote one novel , The Bell Jar , which was published in 1963 . The novel accounts the mental collapse of the protagonist Esther Greenwood . Plath committed suicide just one month after the publication of The Bell Jar .

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5. Anna Swell

Anna had affinity for horses which later became one of her driving forces to write a children's book which promoted love for the animal , Black Beauty . Black beauty published after six years of hard work in 1877 . Just five month after its release , Swell died at the age of 58 .

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6. Ralph Ellison

Ralph Ellison rose to prominence when he published Invisible Man in 1952 ,. The book was a rave hit and bagged the National Book Award for Fiction in 1953. Ellison continued writing his second novel but in 1967 , a fire in his home consumed his manuscripts . He endured the painstaking job of re-writing his manuscript but died before the book (Juneteenth) was published posthumously .

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7. Arundhati Roy

The God of Small Things , published in 1997 , won the Booker Prize and has been Roy's only major work as a novel although she has written and published non-fictional stories and screenplays .

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8. John Kennedy Toole

A brilliant writer whose , picaresque novel A Confederacy of Dunces was published after 10 years of him committing suicide from the stress of his book being rejected by every publisher. It was his mother who endured a long struggle to publish his son's splendid work . The book won John a posthumous Pulitzer Prize .

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9.Margaret Mitchell

Here is a strange case of a writer who never intended to publish her book but after her book Gone with the Wind got published in 1936 , it propelled Margaret to such fame she always despised and looked and avoided . She won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1957 . Gone with the Wind is the only novel published when she was alive as he died at the age of 49 , after she met with a

car accident . Her last work , Lost Laysen was published posthumously in

1996 .

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10. Edgar Allan Poe

Poe is regarded as a central figure of Romanticism in American literature . Maestro in suspense and horror , he is also considered as originator of detective fiction and major contributor to the evolution of science fiction , His only novel , The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket (1838) is one of his prime work .

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