When the Debut Is Forgotten: Second Books That Made the Name

Why does a first book fail? The question sounds simple, though the answers rarely are. A debut can receive little attention because it was published at the wrong time, or because readers and critics have difficulty placing it. Sometimes the writer has not yet found the form the material requires. The three cases in this essay examine debuts that received limited recognition for different reasons, and the different directions their authors took in their second novels.

Salman Rushdie’s Grimus (1975) was a work of science fiction and fantasy whose experimental approach failed to win broad critical recognition. Jack Kerouac’s The Town and the City (1950) was a conventional coming-of-age novel influenced by Thomas Wolfe, written before Kerouac developed the distinctive prose style that would make him famous. Malcolm Lowry’s Ultramarine (1933) appeared when he was twenty-four, but received unfavorable reviews and did not establish the literary reputation he would later achieve. The three sections that follow examine how each writer’s career developed beyond their first novel.

Midnight’s Children and the Making of Salman Rushdie

Rushdie’s first novel, Grimus, was published in 1975 when he was in his late twenties. It was an ambitious work of science fiction and fantasy, drawing on mythology, philosophy, and literary allusion, following a protagonist named Flapping Eagle to an isolated island in another dimension. The novel asked large questions about identity and existence, but its many ideas competed for attention. Rushdie had plenty to say, though he had not yet found the most effective way to bring all of it together.

Six years later, Midnight’s Children (1981) offered a different kind of ambition. Its protagonist, Saleem Sinai, was born at the precise moment of Indian independence on the midnight of August 15, 1947. His life becomes inseparable from the history of the country, and his extraordinary abilities connect him to hundreds of other children born during the same hour. The premise is fantastical, but the history it carries is real. Rushdie had found a way to make the improbable serve a recognizable historical experience, allowing the private life of one character to reflect the fortunes of a nation.

The difference between the two novels is not that Rushdie abandoned the imagination that animated the first. He put it to better use. The strange worlds and philosophical questions of Grimus gave way to a story in which the fantastic could illuminate a nation’s history. In Midnight’s Children, Saleem’s personal history repeatedly collides with the history of India. This is not a distraction from the subject but part of its method. A man trying to tell the story of his life discovers that he cannot separate it from the story of his country.

The reception was also markedly different. Midnight’s Children won the Booker Prize in 1981, and later received two special distinctions, the Booker of Bookers and the Best of the Booker. The success was not simply a matter of a second novel finding more readers. Rushdie had brought the elements of his imagination together in a work whose formal experiments were inseparable from its historical purpose.

It is tempting to treat Grimus as a preliminary exercise, a first attempt Rushdie needed to get out of the way. But that would be too easy. The first book already contained an interest in other worlds, philosophical uncertainty, and the instability of ordinary assumptions. What changed was how those interests were organized. In Midnight’s Children, they acquired a historical setting, a compelling narrator, and a structure capable of holding their contradictions together.

On the Road and the Voice of a Generation

Kerouac’s first novel, The Town and the City, was published in 1950 to 10,500 copies and mixed reviews. It followed a family through the disruptions of war and the loss of an older way of life, and it was written within a conventional narrative structure that Kerouac had spent years developing. The reception brought him some attention but not the career he wanted. When his next project took a radically different form, Harcourt Brace rejected it, ending his relationship with his editor and beginning a long search for another publisher.

In April 1951, Kerouac produced the first draft of On the Road (1957) in three weeks, typing on a continuous scroll of paper roughly 120 feet long. The speed has become part of the novel’s legend, but the story began years earlier, with several attempts to write about his travels (the scroll was not the finished book). After Harcourt Brace turned it down, Kerouac kept revising and submitting, and Viking Press eventually accepted it with the support of the editor Malcolm Cowley. Before publication in 1957, the manuscript was cut, and the names of real people were changed.

When the novel appeared in September 1957, Gilbert Millstein’s review in The New York Times called its publication “a historic occasion.” Millstein argued that it gave expression to the Beat Generation much as Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises (1926) had represented the Lost Generation. Other reviewers questioned the style, the characters, and the treatment of sex and social convention, but the debate itself established the book’s cultural significance. The prose, with its long rushing sentences and its attention to jazz, offered a different way of representing experience.

What Kerouac had found in On the Road was not simply a subject but a method. Its success transformed Kerouac’s public identity. He became the most recognizable figure associated with the Beat Generation, frequently labeled its king despite his discomfort with the role. The attention was immediate, and it narrowed the public understanding of his work, turning a prolific writer into a cultural symbol.

The Town and the City can look like a prelude to the book that made him famous, but the difference between them is not simply a matter of reception. The first showed a writer working within an established form. The second found a form suited to the restless movement of its subject. Kerouac’s breakthrough came when the way he wrote became inseparable from what he wanted to describe. On the Road did not simply tell a story about searching for freedom. Its prose does not describe the search so much as carry the reader along with it.

Under the Volcano and the Myth It Became

Malcolm Lowry’s first novel, Ultramarine, was published in 1933. It drew on his experience as a deckhand aboard a freighter bound for Yokohama in 1927 and followed a young man’s initiation into life at sea. The book received generally unfavorable reviews, and of the 1,500 copies printed, only about half were sold. A revised edition appeared in 1963, after Lowry’s death, with an introductory note by his widow, Margerie Bonner Lowry. The first book was not without ambition, but its autobiographical material had yet to acquire the scope and symbolic complexity that would characterize his best-known work.

Under the Volcano (1947) took nearly a decade to write. Lowry began it in Mexico in 1936, and over the following years the manuscript survived a divorce, a remarriage, repeated revisions, and the destruction of his home by fire. An early version was rejected by twelve publishers before Lowry completed a substantially revised manuscript, and before the book was published in 1947. Most of the story takes place on November 2, 1938, the Day of the Dead, and follows Geoffrey Firmin, a former British consul in Mexico, through the final hours of his life. The novel is not simply a record of that day so much as the interior world of a man who cannot escape himself.

What Lowry found in Under the Volcano was a form large enough to contain the material that had defeated him in Ultramarine. The earlier novel already drew on his life at sea and explored alienation, memory, and the search for belonging. In the later work, personal experience becomes part of a more intricate symbolic structure, bringing private suffering into contact with history, politics, and religion. The Consul is not Lowry, but the Consul’s hell is Lowry’s hell, rendered with a precision and intensity that the first book could not reach. The contrast is not between autobiography and art, but between two different ways of turning autobiographical material into fiction.

Under the Volcano was not immediately received as the major novel it would later become. It drew significant critical attention on publication, but it was remaindered in Britain and had gone out of print by the time Lowry died in 1957. Its reputation grew over the following decades, largely through its reception in North America, and it eventually secured a place among the major novels of twentieth-century modernism. The difficulty that once limited its readership became part of its standing, though the novel’s significance rests on more than the demands it makes.

The myth that grew around Under the Volcano was not simply the myth of the book but also that of the author who wrote it. Lowry died ten years after publication, and the story of his life became entwined with the story of the novel. Yet biography alone cannot explain the novel’s achievement. What Ultramarine had begun as an exploration of experience, Under the Volcano developed into a more ambitious examination of suffering and its meaning. The first novel was not a rehearsal for the second but an earlier attempt at the same questions, written by a man who had not yet found the form that could hold them.

What the Second Book Can Do

The three debuts featured in this essay went unread for different reasons. And none of these reasons had anything to do with whether the writers had something to say. Each reason was about the writing’s form, and in each case, the second book was where the writer found the form the first one lacked. All of these discoveries came from the second book, and all of them required the first book to be completed first. What the three “second books” share is not a method but a result. In each case, the writer did not abandon what the first book had attempted. The writer found a way to make it legible.

The three cases also show that the second book need not be better than the first. It only has to be different in a way the first book could not be. Rushdie’s Grimus was strange, but Midnight’s Children made that strangeness matter. Kerouac’s The Town and the City was conventional, and On the Road abandoned convention altogether. Lowry’s Ultramarine stayed close to his own experience, while Under the Volcano turned that experience into something larger than life. The second book is not an improvement on the first but an answer to it.

The next essay considers a different possibility. Some writers do not need a second book to overcome the limitations of a debut but to develop what was already there. Jane Austen, Toni Morrison, and Alice Munro each followed a first book with a second that extended qualities already present in the earlier work. That essay examines what happens when a writer does not need to change direction to move forward but to take the promise of the first book even further.

Further Reading

• Salman Rushdie on Midnight’s Children at 40: ‘India is no longer the country of this novel’ by Salman Rushdie, The Guardian
• America’s first king of the road by Sean O’Hagan, The Guardian
• Under the Volcano: a modernist masterpiece by Chris Power, The Guardian