殚精竭虑 一生只写一部著作的巨匠

For 55 years, Harper Lee had been one of the best-known literary one hit wonders: she won the Pulitzer prize for her only published novel, To Kill a Mockingbird. But now the 88-year-old has revealed that she will publish a second novel this summer, which she technically wrote before To Kill a Mockingbird and which even inspired her only book to date.

But Lee leaves a number of literary one-hit wonders behind her. Here are a few of the best:

Published in 1936, the sweeping tale of Scarlett O'Hara and the dashing Rhett Butler was an instant success. Mitchell, a writer for her local Atlanta newspaper, won the Pulitzer Prize and saw her debut novel turned into a Hollywood epic.

Mitchell hated fame and declared that she would not write another word as long as she lived. She died in a road accident in 1949. In 1995, an unpublished manuscript she had written as a teenager was discovered. It was published the following year as Lost Laysen, a romantic novella set in the South Pacific.

While Wilde built a career of writing poetry and plays, his arguably most controversial work was his only published novel. At the end of the 19th century its narrative of obsession, murder and hedonism offended Victorian society, with critics dubbing The Picture of Dorian Grey everything from "effeminate" to "unclean". Perhaps it rubbed off: Wilde never wrote another novel again.

Although he wrote short stories and the novella Franny and Zooey, The Catcher in the Rye was Salinger's only novel. The author was believed to have retreated from society to spend his last half century as a hermit, until letters published in January this year revealed that he had been travelling the world, visiting West End shows and popping into Burger King, all the while happily chatting to strangers who had no idea who he was.

Brontë published her one and only novel under the pseudonym Ellis Bell. She died the following year, aged 30, from tuberculosis. In 1850, a new edition of Wuthering Heights was published with a preface written by her sister, Charlotte.

While Pasternak was an acclaimed poet, he only published one novel: Dr Zhivago. The controversial tome struggled to get published because of Pasternak's controversial attitude to socialism in soviet Russia. The manuscript was smuggled out of Russia before being published in Italy. When the novel won Pasternak the Nobel Prize in 1958, he was forced to turn it down by the Soviet authorities - or else face exile or prison. However, it was not this strife which meant Pasternak never published another novel, but the fact he died two years later from lung cancer.

English novellist Sewell wrote the equine children's classic in the last years of her life while she confined to bed by ill health. There she worked on it for seven years, finally being published six months before she died - just long enough for her to witness its instant early success.

Its 4,215 pages are split over seven volumes, but In Search of Lost Time counts as one novel. Proust started writing it in 1909, and was still working on until he fell ill for the final time, weeks before his death in November 1922. Although the sprawling novel continued to be published five years after his death, Proust raised the funds to publish the first part of it himself in 1913.