Magnum Opus Dissonance / Literature

Examples of Magnum Opus Dissonance in literature.

• Tolkien's Legendarium:
  • J. R. R. Tolkien wrote The Lord of the Rings merely in accordance with popular demand for a sequel to The Hobbit - his true labor of love was The Silmarillion, which he spent essentially his entire adult life writing and which he was still polishing and rewriting when he died. In fact, he initially advanced the The Silmarillion for publishing instead and only wrote The Lord of the Rings when he was told his Elvish History would not ever be published.
  • The Hobbit was written as a story for Tolkien's children, therefore he tried to make it good enough that his children would enjoy it. Meanwhile, The Lord of the Rings was written as commissioned by Tolkien's agent as a followup. Despite this, the latter is more well-known and more often referenced.
  • On top of this, there is also the fact that Tolkien was a well-respected professor of philology at Oxford, and while he can hardly be counted as a prolific academic writer, he did write a number of very influential academic works. These include definitive Modern English translations of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and Beowulf, along with a very spirited defense of the literary value of Anglo-Saxon poetry and a dictionary of Middle English, each of which could be considered a magnum opus.
• Ender's Game was originally just another short story that Orson Scott Card wrote to pay the bills. He only expanded it into a novel so that it could serve as an introduction to Speaker for the Dead (the story that he really wanted to tell); he feels his best work is his short story Unaccompanied Sonata. While these are certainly well-regarded among those who have read them, Ender's Game has become one of the most widely read sci-fi novels of all time, is required reading in many middle schools, and received a film adaptation.
• Robert Louis Stevenson only wrote The Black Arrow for a quick buck while he penned Prince Otto, which he considered a superior work. However, The Black Arrow ended up being much more popular and his third best known work, whereas Prince Otto became forgotten.
• Neuromancer is William Gibson's most famous and acclaimed work because it invented the Cyberpunk genre and featured commentary on the information age decades ahead of its time. But in terms of actual literary merit, Gibson considers it one of his weakest works (though it was his first novel). Compared to his later novels, its characterization is minimal, and the plot is very straightforward.
• Little Women for Louisa May Alcott. She cobbled together a few stories based on herself and her sisters, and it was a rip-roaring success. She made the same thing happen to Jo in its final sequel Jo's Boys.
• Jane Austen thought Pride and Prejudice, her most popular novel, was "too light and bright and sparkling" and deliberately planned afterward to write something more serious with a little "shade." The result was Mansfield Park, a textbook case of Creator's Oddball and her least popular novel.
• Mark Twain waffled between saying that his favorite of his works was Huckleberry Finn, which has come to be his most respected novel, and Personal Recollections Of Joan Of Arc, which few have even heard of. At one point, he claimed, "I like Joan of Arc best of all my books; and it is the best; I know it perfectly well. And besides, it furnished me seven times the pleasure afforded me by any of the others; twelve years of preparation, and two years of writing. The others needed no preparation and got none."
• Lewis Carroll greatly preferred Sylvie and Bruno to his Alice in Wonderland books.
• Charles Dickens wrote enough other highly acclaimed and popular books that he only presents a borderline example, but A Christmas Carol follows the mold: he wrote it in a hurry for the money and it continues to be one of the best known and most imitated of his works. However, of his own works, his favourite was reportedly the novel Martin Chuzzlewit, which hardly has the universal acclaim or influence of, say, Oliver Twist, David Copperfield, A Tale of Two Cities, Great Expectations or the aforementioned Christmas Carol.
• Robert Asprin started work on Another Fine Myth for laughs, merely to give himself a break from the grimness of another book he was writing, The Cold Cash War. Nowadays, he is fondly remembered for the Myth Adventures series, while Cold Cash War gathers dust alongside other ur-cyberpunk dystopian sci-fi.
• William Shakespeare apparently thought more of The Rape of Lucrece than King Lear. This is largely due to Values Dissonance; at the time, epic poetry was considered the highest form of literary art; plays, on the other hand, were seen as lowest-common-denominator trivialities. Today, of course, his plays are better known than his (still great) poetry.
• 19th-century British Romantic poets such as Lord Byron, John Keats, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and their peers were obsessed with reviving English verse drama and kept churning out faux-Shakespearean plays that seldom rose above mediocre. In time, many of them thought that this failure invalidated Romanticism. When worrying over how posterity would judge them, they never thought their lyric poetry could count for much.
• David Weber is famous for his Honor Harrington books, while his Safehold books are being considered the critically preferred work. But it's The War Gods that's his favorite, and he's described what he's written as far as The Hobbit in that series to the The Lord of the Rings, and states that work will be the one that lasts.
• Stephen King:
  • When most people think of him, they think of The Shining. And while The Shining was indeed a very personal work to King (it being an analogy for King's own alcoholism) he has gone on record stating that he feels Pet Sematary was the scariest novel he ever wrote.
  • Most people only know The Shining because of the film, not the book (It would fall into a similar category). King himself would consider The Dark Tower to be his Magnum Opus, a truly huge, multi-volume work that took him years to write (and he notably made a point to finish after he nearly died). However, most literary critics, King fans, and even King himself in the forewords of some of his books, would hold The Stand to be his single best work.
• H. P. Lovecraft:
  • Lovecraft considered The Call of Cthulhu to be one of his weaker stories. Although many of his actual readers agree, Cthulhu is by far his most well-known creation.
  • Both Lovecraft and his later readers hold the highest esteem for The Colour Out of Space, considered to be the quintessential Cosmic Horror Story.
  • This arguably applies to the whole of Lovecraft's work: While he's considered to be one of the greatest American horror writers, he considered himself to be mediocre at best. (He was an Ascended Fanboy of Robert W. Chambers.) For example, he had this to say about his writing:
    "I have no illusions concerning the precarious status of my tales, and do not expect to become a serious competitor of my favorite weird authors - Poe, Arthur Machen, Dunsany, Algernon Blackwood, Walter de la Mare, and Montague Rhodes James. The only thing I can say in favor of my work is its sincerity."
• At different times in their careers, both the poet T. S. Eliot and the author Henry James thought their real destiny lay in writing for the theatre. Unfortunately, James was not a particularly good dramatist, and while Eliot did write some well-known plays (such as Murder in the Cathedral), none have reached the fame of The Waste Land or "Prufrock".
• Anthony Burgess resents that he's best known for A Clockwork Orange, which he thought shallow compared to his other works. (He dismissed it as "a novel I am prepared to repudiate... a jeu d'esprit knocked off for money in three weeks.")
• Harlan Ellison expresses his frustration in one of his audiobooks over the fact that I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream, a story he banged out in a day, is so popular and has been reprinted many, many times; whereas "Grail", a story he slaved over for weeks, revising it several times, and in his opinion one of his best, had never been reprinted.
• While Mario Puzo is known for his novel The Godfather, which was a smash hit in the 1970s and turned into an even more popular film, Puzo always considered his earlier novel The Fortunate Pilgrim to be his best. It's perhaps fitting that people generally remember the original The Godfather book as a fairly pulpy story compared to its adaptation.
• Ernest Hemingway regarded the critically lambasted Across the River and Into the Trees as his greatest work.
• Cecil Day-Lewis (Daniel's father) was Poet Laureate in the UK and wrote a lot of serious poetry and verse drama, but he also wrote detective novels to pay the bills. Particularly in the 50s and 60s he was far better known for the detective books (written under the name Nicholas Blake), some of which were adapted for film and TV. His poetry was never the equal of contemporaries like Auden or Larkin and is now largely forgotten, but his detective novels are still regarded as classics by some.
• Philip Larkin, meanwhile, wanted to be a novelist rather than a poet. His two novels are read only by a few academics, but his poetry remains popular, acclaimed, and widely quoted.
• Charles Perrault published writings and essays about art that were mostly forgotten centuries later. But the work he is still most famous for, his Fairy Tales, are still popular today and indeed do much to define those that are in the Small Reference Pools. Ironically enough, Perrault felt ashamed about these childish stories and published them under his son's name.
• Same holds for the Brothers Grimm, who considered their work on historical linguistics their greatest achievement. Although linguists still use it (Grimm's Law, a sound change that occurred in Proto-Indo-European that moved towards Proto-Germanic) and respect them as early forayers into modern linguistics, everyone else remembers their Fairy Tales.
• Thomas Hardy's relationship with this phenomenon was twofold:
  • Hardy always wanted to be a poet and believed that poetry had a "supreme place in literature". However, he wrote novels because it was more lucrative, and he wouldn't earn a living if he started as a poet. With the success of Tess of the D'Urbervilles and Jude the Obscure, he returned to writing poetry for the rest of his life. Most people tend to know Hardy as a novelist than as a poet, though.
  • Regarding his career as a novelist, Hardy considered Jude the Obscure his favorite and best novel, but it was harshly received at the time. At least one reviewer called it "Jude the Obscene", and Hardy himself claimed that the Anglican bishop William Walsham How burned his own copy. Subsequent scholars (and readers) have taken Hardy's side.
• Edgar Rice Burroughs considered John Carter of Mars stories to be his best works. They are obscure compared to his other series, Tarzan. One need only look at Burroughs's Hollywood legacy. Tarzan has been adapted countless times since the days of silent movies, and has been an enormously successful property, while the film adaptation of John Carter spent 81 years in Development Hell, was completed by Disney in 2012 and promptly bombed in a spectacular way.
• Pyotr Pavlovich Yershov wrote dozens of poems, plenty of stories, and considered them to be much better than some fairy-tale poem he wrote in simpleton language when he was young. Except that today, the poems and stories are all but forgotten, while The Little Humpbacked Horse earned him a statue for composing a folk tale.
• John Buchan is most remembered for codifying the Spy Genre with The Thirty-Nine Steps, but the novel he considered his best was the historical romance/fantasy novel, Witch Wood.
• Miguel de Cervantes's Don Quixote. At the 1600s in Spain, money was found in theater, and glory was found in poetry. Miguel de Cervantes wrote a comedy book that didn't get noticed by critics. Nonetheless, it was successful enough for the editor kept asking for a continuation. But Cervantes had Attention Deficit Creator Disorder and wanted to write a lot of projects that would bring him glory, like "Los trabajos de Persiles y Segismunda". No one took the comedy book seriously, not even Cervantes. Maybe that continuation would have never seen the light of day if not for a fanfiction writer that wrote himself the second part, doing the worst insult you can do to an author: A Fix Fic, because Cervantes wrote some characters deserving of a better writer. Cervantes decided to write the best second part he could, and so we have now the second part of Don Quixote.
• Doctor Arthur Conan Doyle created a detective character based on an old medical professor whose techniques and insight had always impressed him to pay the bills while he worked on the historical epics he loved so much and which he was sure would make his name and reputation as a writer and artist. Unfortunately for Conan Doyle, the detective character was Sherlock Holmes, who became one of the most iconic characters of all time, while Doyle's historical dramas, which he much preferred, are largely forgotten. Doyle was not happy about this (he even tried killing Holmes off at one point, but fan backlash forced him to do an about-face).
• Isaac Asimov's "Nightfall (1941)": "Nightfall" was, to Isaac Asimov, just another story, though it regularly appears at the top of lists of the best SF story ever. It especially irked him because he wrote it when he was 21 and was somewhat offended by the implication that, in fifty years and hundreds and hundreds of works, he never did anything better. His own favorite was "The Last Question".
  • Asimov also recalls that he thought Strikebreaker would be a social commentary bomb. It remained instead a relatively obscure short story, and he has explicitly contrasted it with Nightfall.
• C. S. Lewis's The Screwtape Letters and his Narnia series sold phenomenally, by his standards, but his own favorite was Till We Have Faces. Then, his big problem with Screwtape was that it, alone among his works, was actively unpleasant to write. Another one of Lewis' favorite books that he wrote is Perelandra, which he once said was worth ten 'Screwtapes'.
• Matsuo Basho was a Japanese poet from the 1600s who is considered to be one of the masters of haiku, then called "hokku"^note Hokku (発句, lit. "starting verse") is the opening stanza for renga and renku, both forms of collaborative linked verse poetry. When Bashō came around, the hokku began to appear as a self-contained poem, and it was then renamed "haiku" by the 19th-century Japanese poet Masaoka Shiki. Regarding this, Bashō himself said: "Many of my followers can write hokku as well as I can. Where I show who I really am is in linking haikai verses."
• Reki Kawahara's light novel series Sword Art Online was originally a one-volume stand-alone story written for a literary competition in 2002 that he didn't even submit it to. It was instead put on the web, and only after gaining popularity, did he decide to start writing follow on volumes. SAO eventually got so big it was published to paperback in 2009 and is now eleven volumes and still going, with a Manga, Anime, and Video Game adaptation plus a huge fanbase.
• Neil Munro considered himself an author of historical novels, his Para Handy stories being something he wrote to pay the bills. A hundred years later, the Para Handy stories are still well-loved Scottish literature and have been adapted several times. Fans might also be familiar with his other humorous stories, Erchie, My Droll Friend and Jimmy Swan. The historical novels are mostly known as "that thing Munro did that wasn't as good as Para Handy."
• Monsignor Robert Hugh Benson, an Anglican priest who was received into the Catholic Church, is best known for Come Rack! Come Rope!, a novel set at the time of the Elizabethan persecution of Catholics; and Lord Of The World, a dystopian novel about the Antichrist and the end of the world. Pope Benedict XVI and Pope Francis called the latter novel "prophetic". Monsignor Benson himself saw The History of Richard Raynal, Solitary, a historical novel in which the titular Richard is sent by God to deliver a message of dire importance to the king while enduring torment from the king's men, as his personal favorite of his books.
• J. D. Salinger, in a very, very rare interview, said that The Catcher in the Rye was a mistake, and the bulk of his writing since then has been about the Glass family, as well as nonfiction about Vedāntic Hinduism.
• K. A. Applegate enlisted Ghost Writers to help her complete Animorphs so that she could instead give Everworld her full undivided attention. Everworld became a rather obscure book series, while Animorphs was, for a time, the most popular children's book series in America.
• Gene Wolfe is best known for The Epic Mind Screw The Book of the New Sun. The author himself considers it overrated, and his own favorite is the later Fantastic Romance There Are Doors.
• Robert Rankin's novel The Fandom of the Operator actually revolves around this trope. The villain turns out to be a deceased author suffering from Magnum Opus dissonance, driven mad by a botched attempt to raise him from the dead to continue writing the detective novels that he always considered vastly inferior to his beloved but much less popular space operas.
• Herman Melville had a very strange relationship with this phenomenon:
  • During his own lifetime, Melville was really only respected for his first two books, Typee and Omoo, quasi-biographical adventure stories based on his own experience in the South Pacific. These two works are now only taught in dedicated Melville classes, and towards the end of his career, with no knowledge of Moby-Dick coming down the road, he expressed regret that he would be forever known as "the man who lived among the cannibals."
  • Melville's first serious attempt at great fiction was Mardi, a Wacky Wayside Tribe-laden adventure story bogged down with snarling philosophical tangents, a protagonist who up and disappears for two-thirds of the novel, and an open ending. Despite all this, he called Mardi his "child of many prayers" and hoped it would blow audiences away. It was blasted by critics for all of this and for being quite different from his first two novels; modern scholars often consider it the only outright bad thing he wrote.
  • Moby-Dick is, of course, Melville's most famous novel, and as with Mardi he set out intentionally to write a magnificent work - calling it this time a "mighty book on a mighty theme." While Moby-Dick is now one of the fixtures in the canon, it was very poorly received and called blasphemous by the press of the day. Though Melville anticipated the controversy, he told Nathaniel Hawthorne in a letter that he had written "a very evil book". On top of that, Melville actually thought he could write an even better novel, and only gave up that notion after Moby-Dick failed. Though the books after that, Pierre; or the Ambiguities, The Confidence-Man: His Masquerade and his posthumous work, Billy Budd are regarded among his best writings today.
• V. C. Andrews is most known for her gothic, incest-laden family sagas like Flowers in the Attic, but she was particularly proud of Gods of Green Mountain according to her brothers. Never heard of it? That's because it was published years after her death and is only available in eBook format. It's also notable that this was the only science fiction novel to ever be published under her name.
• John Gardner considered The Man from Barbarossa, his eleventh James Bond book, to be his best in the series. Critics and some of the readers hold it as one of his weakest and think of his earlier stories in higher regard.
• Georgette Heyer wanted to be taken seriously as a historical novelist and expended much effort and research on works such as My Lord John (a novel set in the Middle Ages, left unfinished at her death), considering her sparkling and enduringly popular Regency romances to be fluffy potboilers. Readers almost unanimously agree it's in the Regency-set fiction that she displays her true genius.
• "September 1, 1939" is one of the most famous poems by W. H. Auden; however he came to dislike it, and decades later, he only allowed it to be reprinted in an anthology with a note saying that he considers it to be "trash which he is ashamed to have written."
• The best-known work of Shel Silverstein was his children's book The Giving Tree. However, Silverstein openly confessed during his life that The Giving Tree was not his favorite of his books.
• Dorothy L. Sayers remains best known for her mystery novels starring Amateur Sleuth Lord Peter Wimsey, but she personally thought her best work was a translation of The Divine Comedy.
• Alfred Bester thought Golem¹⁰⁰ was his best work. Most of those who've read it consider it to be one of his worst.
• Zigzagged by the Diary of a Wimpy Kid series. Jeff Kinney, the author, has said that his favorite book of the series is The Long Haul, which many fans consider the beginning of the series's Sequelitis. However, the installment Kinney is proudest of is the very well-received first book.
• L. Frank Baum will always be best known for The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, but afterwards he was roped into making it a series. By the fourth and fifth books, his introductions become pleas to his fans to allow him to write anything else. After the sixth book, he finally tried to quit and began a new series that he considered his best work. After two books, The Sea Fairies and Sky Island, it became clear that the series was a flop, and with his mounting financial troubles, Baum would have to return to the Oz series to pay the bills. He would work on the series until his death. As an aside, his favorite Oz book was The Scarecrow of Oz, perhaps because it includes the main characters from his other failed series and almost acts as a suitable conclusion to the series. It is rarely cited as a favorite among fans, tellingly.
• Zig-Zagged by Dr. Seuss. He considered The Lorax to be the best book he ever wrote, but general audiences found the book to be too anvilicious. However, it has since been Vindicated by History.
• Gabriel García Márquez talked about his displeasure that he got international fame for writing One Hundred Years of Solitude and his dislike for what many critics consider as the greatest novel in Latin American literature. His dislike for it stems for how it overshadowed the rest of his work, for how critics and intellectuals have praised it without understanding it properly, brought him unwanted amounts of fame, and lastly, he considers his other novels to be far superior to it.
• William March considered his 1954 novel The Bad Seed to be thoroughly mediocre, though it is his most well-known and praised novel today.
• Beatrix Potter's favorites of her own books were The Tailor of Gloucester and The Tale Of The Pie And The Patty Pan, but her most popular book by far is her first one, The Tale of Peter Rabbit.
• Franz Kafka despised his work so much that, on his deathbed, he asked his friend Max Brod to destroy his manuscript and notes. Had Brod not declined his friend's dying wish, Kafka's most famous works like The Trial and The Castle wouldn't be around today. The only one of his works Kafka had anything good to say about in his lifetime, meanwhile, was The Verdict, a short story which is now either dismissed as a piece of juvenalia or forgotten entirely.
  • Asking Brod to destroy his manuscripts and notes is an interesting story. Kafka mentioned several times before his death that he intended to ask Brod to do so, and Brod always told him that he wouldn't do it, as he respected Kafka's work and disagreed with Kafka's desire to have it destroyed. He even believed Kafka really didn't want his works destroyed, because if he did, he would have either done it himself or asked someone else to do it.
• Turkish science fiction writer and artist C. M. Kosemen is most famous (on the internet, at least) as the writer of All Tomorrows. However, he has personally claimed that his favorite work is his long-gestating Speculative Biology project, Snaiad.
• Downplayed with Agatha Christie, as both her main characters are successful and well-loved by the public. However, Poirot is slightly more well-remembered and ingrained in popular culture, whereas Miss Marple was Christie's own favourite of the two.
• Clement Moore, a 19th-Century writer and theologian, considered his American-Hebrew Dictionary to be his greatest achievement. What he is most known for, however, is a small poem he wrote for his young children called 'Twas the Night Before Christmas.
• Henry De Vere Stacpoole considered his most famous work, the 1908 novel The Blue Lagoon to be an inferior work. He called his later novel The Man Who Lost Himself (1918) his masterpiece. He also disliked the Blue Lagoon sequels, which he did mainly to pay the bills.
• Kir Bulychev was rather disdainful of his Alice, Girl from the Future franchise (he even admitted to never rereading the books after publication, and boy, it shows) and loved the stories of Great Gusliar. However, Alice quickly became one of the best-loved characters of Russian children's literature, while Bulychev complained that the editors begged him for something "non-gusliarish"; and even now, while well-known enough, the Gusliar stories are nowhere near as ingrained in popular culture as the ones about Alice.
• Goethe assumed up to his death, that his works on the colour scale (which had already been discarded) would leave a more lasting impression on the world, than his books.
• Upton Sinclair is best known for The Jungle to the extent that most people who don't know any better assume that he's a One-Book Author. However, Sinclair was a highly prolific author, and he considered his most important work to be The Brass Check. Sinclair was, in fact, enormously disappointed with the popularity of The Jungle, due in no small part to believing that it was popular for all the wrong reasons.^note He had intended the book to highlight the plight of the working poor in industrial centers like Chicago; instead the public was focused on the horrific descriptions of the unsanitary conditions in which their meat was processed. The Brass Check on the other hand was a scathing, impossible-to-misconstrue criticism of American journalism that Sinclair sung the praises of in the text of the book itself. Part of the reason why the book is not nearly as well known was that newspapers refused to acknowledge its existence.
• Russian writer Maxim Gorky's greatest and best-known work is typically considered to be his novel Mother. Gorky himself considered the novel a failure, believing his true magnum opus was the unfinished Doorstopper The Life of Klim Samgin.

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