An author is a "two-hit wonder" to the extent that there is a small difference in popularity between the most and second-most popular of his works, and a large difference between the second and the third. Thus, if a, b, and c are numbers representing the popularity of an author's three most popular works, then the greater the value of b2/ac, the more of a "two-hit wonder" that author is.
The values for a, b, and c can be acquired by checking the author page on LibraryThing, which lists how many copies of each book are owned by members of that site. (This is easier than checking Amazon, because LT combines the various editions of each book.)
Take George Orwell, for instance, as a pretty clear example of a two-hit wonder. His top three works on LT are 1984 (64,964), Animal Farm (46,341 copies), and Down and Out in Paris and London (6,378). There are also 2,625 copies of books that combine Animal Farm and 1984 in a single volume, so:
For comparison, Herman Melville is an obvious example of a one-hit wonder.
The values for a, b, and c can be acquired by checking the author page on LibraryThing, which lists how many copies of each book are owned by members of that site. (This is easier than checking Amazon, because LT combines the various editions of each book.)
Take George Orwell, for instance, as a pretty clear example of a two-hit wonder. His top three works on LT are 1984 (64,964), Animal Farm (46,341 copies), and Down and Out in Paris and London (6,378). There are also 2,625 copies of books that combine Animal Farm and 1984 in a single volume, so:
- a (1984) = 64,964 + 2,625 = 67,589
- b (Animal Farm) = 46,341 + 2,625 = 48,966
- c (Down and Out) = 6,378
- b2/ac = 5.56
For comparison, Herman Melville is an obvious example of a one-hit wonder.
- a (Moby-Dick) = 27,517
- b (Bartelby) = 2,121
- c (Billy Budd) = 2,094
- b2/ac = 0.08
Charles Dickens wrote a large number of popular books.
- a (Great Expectations) = 30,222
- b (A Tale of Two Cities) = 28,643
- c (Oliver Twist) = 18,408
- b2/ac = 1.47
Now that the metric is established, and has been shown by a few examples to give reasonable results, we can try to determine which English-language authors are the greatest two-hit wonders. This post was inspired by a post by Bruce Charlton called "Tolkien - the only 'Two Hit Wonder'?" -- so let's look at Tolkien first. Tolkien's case is complicated somewhat by the fact that The Lord of the Rings, a single novel, is very often sold in three volumes, so to get the number I took the total number of one-volume copies, divided the numbers for Fellowship, Towers, and Return by three, and added them all together. The result is:
- The Lord of the Rings = 87,087
- The Hobbit = 80,389
- The Silmarillion = 26,894
- b2/ac = 2.76
So Tolkien is indeed a two-hit wonder to some extent, but to nowhere near the same degree as Orwell. (This result surprised me a bit. I had underestimated the popularity of The Silmarillion.)
Here, then, is a ranked list of some two-hit wonders (score at least 2).
- Anne Brontë = 22.73 (The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, Agnes Grey)
- Samuel Butler = 14.93 (The Way of All Flesh, Erewhon)
- Lewis Carroll = 11.39 (Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, Through the Looking-Glass)
- Barack Obama = 10.58 (The Audacity of Hope, Dreams from My Father)*
- Samuel Richardson = 9.38 (Pamela, Clarissa)
- Wilkie Collins = 6.26 (The Woman in White, The Moonstone)
- George Orwell = 5.56 (1984, Animal Farm)
- Richard Wright = 4.74 (Native Son, Black Boy)
- Thornton Wilder = 4.48 (Our Town, The Bridge of San Luis Rey)
- Jack London = 2.88 (The Call of the Wild, White Fang)
- J. R. R. Tolkien = 2.76 (The Lord of the Rings, The Hobbit)
- Henry Fielding = 2.60 (Tom Jones, Joseph Andrews)
- Mark Twain = 2.08 (Huckleberry Finn, Tom Sawyer)
- Rider Haggard = 2.01 (King Solomon's Mines, She)
So far these are the only ones we (I and various commenters here and on Bruce's original post) have found. (Poets and playwrights have proved hard to analyze, as it is so common for several different works to be sold together in one volume, so I have mostly limited this to novels.) Feel free to add more in the comments.
* Apparently Bill Ayers has repeatedly claimed to be the real author of Dreams of My Father but not of The Audacity of Hope. If that's true (goodthinkers say he's just joking), then of course Obama doesn't count as a two-hit wonder.
17 comments:
Works by Samuel Butler
The Way of All Flesh 2,959 copies, 32 reviews
Erewhon 1,723 copies, 29 reviews
Erewhon and Erewhon Revisited 192 copies, 1 review
The Notebooks of Samuel Butler 83 copies, 1 review
So a = 2959 and b = 1723 + 192 = 1915 and c = 83,for a two-hit-wondership score of 14.9, surpassing everyone we had initially thought of.
Butler is nowhere near as well-known as the authors on your list, but your formula (doubtless by design) factors out an author's absolute popularity.
@Wm - The general approach seems good - but could you explain in words why you chose the formula b2/ac, since it's not obvious to me.
Brice, if a/b is low, the top two works are of comparable popularity. If b/c is high, the third-ranked work is much less popular than the first two. The ratio of these two ratios, (b/c)/(a/b), will increase as b/c increases and/or a/b decreases. Since dividing by a/b is equivalent to multiplying by b/a, this ratio-of-ratios can be rewritten as the formula I have given.
Thanks, Karl. I've added Butler to the list.
If we include writers in languages other than English, Homer is the clear champion (18.57, The Odyssey, The Iliad). There's also Victor Hugo (6.01, Les Miserables, The Hunchback of Notre Dame) and Tolstoy (4.26, Anna Karenina, War and Peace)
@Wm - OK thanks. I didn't, myself originally think it necessary for the two (a and b) works to be of similar popularity, so much as that they be a long way above the third most popular. My inclination would be to have two statistics. The first measure - uses a+b+c as the 'baseline', and then calculates what proportion (%) of that baseline was a+b. Then, an additional statistic for measuring the size of the gap between b and c, expressed as a percentage of the baseline. This just seems more comprehensible in meaning (to me) than b2/ac.
Wilkie Collins 6.26 (The Woman in White, The Moonstone)
Thornton Wilder 4.48 (Our Town, The Bridge of San Luis Rey)
Henry Fielding 2.60 (Tom Jones, Pamela)
Stendhal 2.32 (Le Rouge et le Noir, La Chartreuse de Parme)
Rider Haggard 2.01 (King Solomon's Mines, She)
Barack Obama 10.58 (The Audacity of Hope, Dreams from My Father)
Thanks, Karl. I've added all of them except Stendhal (who did not write in English) to the ranked list in the post.
Whoops.
Samuel Richardson 9.38 (Pamela, Clarissa)
Henry Fielding 2.60 (Tom Jones, Joseph Andrews)
Fixed
@Wm - I think the problem lies in the singleness of statistic, which entails the use of squaring. This makes the scales non-linear and not intuitively comparable. What is wanted is a scale where twice the number means twice as much.
BTW - BHO should not be on the list, since (by *all* accounts) he didn't write the books published under his name. Ghost writing doesn't count!
Bruce, I guess it's not obvious what it means to be "twice as much" a two-hit wonder -- but a score of 2 indicates that the gap between b and c is twice as big as the gap between a and b. A score of 4 indicates that it is 4 times as big. It seems pretty linear and intuitively comparable to me.
Note added about Bill Ayers's claim to have written one of Obama's books.
The other of Obama's books was, I think, written in the usual way that electioneering books for politicians are written - i.e. by a team. That is implied by the acknowledgments section. Obama is just not a writer. He is probably the only tenured (and promoted) faculty member at a major research university (Chicago) ever to have published... Nothing At All. What it is to have friends in high places.
I was triggered by the preponderance of dead white males, but I ought not to have had recourse to current celebrities. How about
Anne Brontë 22.73 (The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, Agnes Grey)
Richard Wright 4.74 (Native Son, Black Boy)
Bruce, I've never read either of Obama's books, though I did for some reason read Steve Sailer's book-length analysis of Dreams. Anyway, I'm leaving him on the list, with an asterisk. I'm also leaving Orwell, despite the persistent rumors that "his" books were actually published under his name by his elder sister Gladys Orwell.
I guess I know how it feels to have ghostwritten work published under one's name, as my own role in the creation of this post of "mine" is turning out to be negligible -- concept by Bruce, all details provided by Karl!
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