One Book Author / Creatives

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Subpages:

• Music

Other examples:

Anime and Manga

• Youko Matsushita only has one series to her name: Descendants of Darkness. When fans asked her if she had written any doujinshi they might want to check out (not an unusual thing to ask a manga author, especially with a Ho Yay heavy work like Descendants of Darkness) she was surprised and just wondered who'd spend their time (and money!) on producing doujinshi.
• Kimagure Orange Road is Izumi Matsumoto's only series. Everything else he's done have been one-shots.
• Eiichiro Oda has gone on record saying that, once he finally finishes writing One Piece, he’ll retire from writing manga as a whole, making this an invoked example.
• Pokémon has some examples:
  • Kazuhiro Ōyama storyboarded nine episodes of the Pokémon Advance Generation anime, but he has no other credits to his name.
  • The Pokémon XY episode "Battling at Full Volume!" was storyboarded by Kazuya Takahashi. This is his solo anime credit.
  • The Pokémon episode "Poké Ball Peril" was storyboarded by Kiyoshi Kobayashi (presumably no relation to the voice actor), his only anime credit to date.
  • Two other Pokémon Storyboarders, Hisashi Shiina and Ryūji Kimura have never worked on any other anime besides Pokémon.
  • Kōdai Kitahara, an animation director, did storyboard work on a episode of Pokémon XYZ ("An Electrifying Rage!"), but it was the only work he was credited as a storyboarder.
• The only serialized manga that Ryouko Kui has to her name is Delicious in Dungeon. Her only other published manga volumes are collections of one-shots.
• Naoki Iwamoto wrote magico and absolutely nothing else, although he did do the character designs for a few anime series.

Comic Strips

• Aside from a few preceding political/college cartoons, Calvin and Hobbes was the only thing Bill Watterson did until ended it in 1995, then his work afterwards was very rare and sporadic, with a few essays, writing the introduction to the first Cul-de-sac collection and contributing an artwork to "Team Cul De Sac", a fundraising book for Parkinson's disease relief commissioned after Richard Thompson, the strip's creator, came down with the disease. He also drew panels for Pearls Before Swine, under the premise that a little girl tells Stephen Pastis that she can draw the strip better than he can (and turns out to be right), and did the poster for STRIPPED, a documentary about comic strips for which he was interviewed. He finally released a substantial, albeit much different, post-C&H work in 2023 with the graphic novel The Mysteries, a collaboration with John Kascht.
• Gary Larson. Aside from a local Seattle newspaper proto-version of The Far Side he did called Nature's Way, the only thing of note that he's ever produced is The Far Side. After it finished its run, he retired and hasn't done much else except for a children's book.
• Kevin McCormick. His only credit as a professional cartoonist is Arnold, which ran in newspapers from 1982 to 1988. After it ended he did some gag-writing on other strips but ultimately left cartooning and became a pastor.
• FoxTrot is, thus far, Bill Amend's only professional cartooning work, though he has collaborated occasionally with Penny Arcade.

Fan Works

• Sybil Brinton wrote Old Friends and New Fancies, the first published Jane Austen fanfic (and a crossover incorporating chaaracters from all of Austen's novels), and nothing else.

Film — Animation

• George Dunning was an animator who made several shorts but only one feature-length film: Yellow Submarine.
• Piotr Kamler was a Polish animator who made many claymation shorts but only one feature-length film, the surreal and experimental Chronopolis, which required 5 years to get made.
• Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within is the only film directed by Hironobu Sakaguchi. The commercial failure of the film caused Square Pictures to be discontinued, and Hironobu Sakaguchi continued working on videogames as he did prior to that movie.
• Tetsuya Nomura's only feature-length work is Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children.
• The infamous Christmas special The Christmas Tree is the only directing credit of Flamarion Ferreira.
• Klaus is the only directing credit of Segio Pablos and Carlos Martínez López.
• Yoshifumi Kondo died shortly after making his only movie, Whisper of the Heart, for Studio Ghibli.
• Killer Bean Forever is the only feature-length film directed by Jeff Lew, who had done effects works for movies like The Matrix Reloaded, and a few Killer Bean shorts.
• Kaena: The Prophecy is the only feature-length film made by both of its directors, Pascal Pinon and Chris Delaporte.
• The "electronic puppet" version made in 1954 of Hansel and Gretel is the only credit of his director, the enigmatic John Paul.
• Tubby the Tuba (1975) is the only film ever directed by Alexander Schure. He died in the year 2009 without making any other movie or short.
• Not much is known about Tim Forder, the director of the infamous Hercules (Pure Magic) animation, but according to movie websites, he never worked in anything else.
• Freddie as F.R.O.7 is the only animated film created by businessman Jon Acevski. He has not worked in animation following the critical and commercial failure of the film.
• Eight Crazy Nights is the only feature-length film directed by Seth Kearsley, who later went to work on television series like Slacker Cats and The Looney Tunes Show.

Film — Live-Action

One-Film Directors

• The Night of the Hunter, directed by Charles Laughton. While the film is today considered a classic, it did terribly when it was first released. Subsequently, Laughton was never given the chance to direct another film. (Of course, the fact that he died of cancer seven years later is also part of the reason.)
• The Senator Was Indiscreet was the only film directed by George S. Kaufman, better known as a hugely successful playwright and stage director (Of Thee I Sing, You Can't Take It With You).
• French writer Jean Giono directed a single film, 1960's Crésus, starring Fernandel''.
• The highly acclaimed Daughters of the Dust (1991) remains the only feature of Julie Dash's career, because it isn't easy for black women to get movies made.
• Kotch was Jack Lemmon's sole film as a director.
• Bill Murray has been working in movies for over thirty years but Quick Change remains his sole directorial credit.
• Dan Aykroyd directed Nothing but Trouble (1991), which proved a Box Office Bomb and is his only such effort to date.
• Short Cut To Hell (1957) was the only movie James Cagney ever directed.
• One-Eyed Jacks is the only film directed by Marlon Brando (who also played the lead role).
• Screenwriter and author Dalton Trumbo directed only one film, Johnny Got His Gun, an adaptation of his own novel.
• Peter Lorre returned to Germany after World War II and tried to reshape his career by writing, directing, and starring in Der Verlorene. The film was poorly received and he returned to Hollywood, resigned to taking whatever roles he was offered.
• Everything Is Illuminated has been the only feature film directed by actor Liev Schreiber so far, though he did direct a couple of episodes of Ray Donovan.
• Writer Steve Gordon had a very weak heart and died less than a year after the release of his sole directorial effort, Arthur (1981), in 1981.
• The Brave is the only film that Johnny Depp has directed. Terrible reviews from American critics not only led him to leave directing but also refuse any offers for an American release of the film.
• While certainly not a literal One Book Author, Stephen King's sole directing credit is on Maximum Overdrive. As he considers the movie something of an Old Shame, this is likely to stay the case.
• Mike Bigelow only directed one film- Deuce Bigalow: European Gigolo and has no other credits on his resume.
• John Ottman's only directorial effort was Urban Legends: Final Cut. He is better known as a composer and Bryan Singer's editor.
• Set designer Bo Welch made his directorial debut with the flop The Cat in the Hat. He never directed another film.
• Steven Seagal directed On Deadly Ground, a pet project which was an environmental action film. It quickly flopped and his star power took a tremendous hit as well, starting his decline until he was consigned to the direct-to-DVD bin.
• Tommy Wiseau has not directed a feature film since The Room (2003), and none of his online projects have gained as high a cult following.
• Morgan Freeman has over a hundred acting credits over a fifty-year showbiz career. Bopha!, a 1993 film about a black policeman in apartheid South Africa, is his one film as a director.
• Marco Schnabel never directed anything other than the Mike Myers vehicle The Love Guru.
• Mystery Men was directed by Kinka Usher, who has no other film directing credits before or after. There was an urban legend that Usher was the pseudonym of Tim Burton, but Usher is actually a real person: a French-born commercial director who simply had a bad experience on the film and went back to making commercials.
• Antony Hoffman's directorial debut was the sci-fi flop Red Planet. He has never directed anything since. Beyond a short he created 14 years later, he has no other film credits in any capacity.
• Russian director Alexandr Askoldov's 1967 film Kommissar was shelved by Communist authorities, who kicked him out of the Communist Party and out of the movie business. Commissar was finally released in 1988 to critical acclaim, but it was the only film Askoldov ever got a chance to direct.
• Oscar-winning cinematographer Gordon Willis (he photographed The Godfather and a number of Woody Allen films) had only one directing credit to his name: the homophobic 1980 thriller Windows, starring Talia Shire as an innocent woman in an apartment complex resisting a lesbian's sexual advances. This is an Old Shame for a lot of people involved in it.
• Sngmoo Lee's only film credit is The Warrior's Way, a film he both directed and written. After the movie bombed heavily at the box office and received mixed reviews, he hasn't done anything since.
• Mission: Impossible creator Bruce Geller had just one big screen credit under his belt, the 1973 caper film Harry in Your Pocket, before his death in a 1978 plane crash.
• Acclaimed film editor Walter Murch directed only one feature, Return to Oz; because of how poorly it did with both critics and audiences, the only other thing he has directed was an episode of Star Wars: The Clone Wars. Shame, since Return to Oz would later become a Cult Classic.
• Mark L. Smith has only directed one film, Séance (which he also wrote), and nothing else. He has become more successful as a screenwriter, becoming the co-writer for The Revenant along with Alejandro González Iñárritu.
• Jane Wagner has been part of a longtime Creator Couple with Lily Tomlin, so she was an obvious choice to write and direct one of Tomlin's first films as a top-billed star, 1978's Moment by Moment, even though she had never directed a film before. It was critically panned (but actually broke even at the box office, since it came out at the height of co-star John Travolta's teen idol phase) and its poor reputation led Wagner to stick to a writing role for Tomlin's projects after that.
• Actress Barbara Loden only wrote/directed one film, 1970's Wanda, before her death in 1980.
• The Adventures of Milo and Otis is the only filmmaking effort for Masanori Hata, who was otherwise a zoologist and author going by the name Mutsugorō.
• Kevin Yagher, a well known special-effects artist (Famous for such things as the puppetry for Chucky) only ventured to the directors chair once. The subsequent Hellraiser: Bloodline was gutted by the studio to such an extent, Yagher refused to have his name attached. He hasn't directed a film since.
• Kevin Williamson, a screenwriter known for the Scream series, Dawson's Creek and The Faculty, only directed one movie, the critically panned Teaching Mrs. Tingle. After the film flopped at the box office, he returned to screenwriting. It didn't help that the movie was originally titled Killing Mrs. Tingle until the Columbine massacre forced a title change.
• Leonard Kastle was an opera composer and librettist who wrote the script for The Honeymoon Killers, which was being produced by his roommate. When their director, a young unknown Martin Scorsese, was fired over creative differences, Kastle directed the film as well. Afterwards he went back to opera.
• Robert Longo, a world renowned painter and sculptor best known for his hyper-realistic Men in the Cities charcoal paintings, directed just one feature-length film: the 1995 cyberpunk thriller Johnny Mnemonic.
• Nicolas Cage is well known for having acted in loads of movies ranging from good to terrible/amusing, but the only time he was in the director's chair was 2002's Sonny.
• Keanu Reeves only directed one movie, the Acclaimed Flop Man of Tai Chi.
• Last Rites was Donald P. Bellisario's only shot at directing a movie.
• Joan Rivers' first and only attempt at directing a movie was 1978's Rabbit Test, which was not received well, though did feature a young Billy Crystal.
• The obscure 1986 comedy Weekend Warriors was the only directorial credit for actor and game show host Bert Convy.
• Grizzly Park is the only film from elusive filmmaker Tom Skull.
• Permanent Midnight, the film adaptation of screenwriter Jerry Stahl's memoirs, starring Ben Stiller, is David Veloz's only directorial credit. He also has a few screenwriting and producer credits.
• An Elephant Sitting Still is the first and last film directed by novelist Hu Bo, who committed suicide shortly after the completion of the film.
• Legend of the Shadowy Ninja: The Ninja Dragon has been the only film directed by mangaka legend Go Nagai, who went right back to producing and creating manga.
• Michael Mason's only directorial effort has been God's Not Dead: A Light in Darkness. Given that there is nearly no information about this filmmaker, some have speculated that Mason was actually a pseudonym for faith-based director Jon Gunn.
• The Dangerous Lives of Altar Boys is the only feature length movie directed by Peter Care. The rest of his filmography consists of music videos.
• A Nightmare on Elm Street (2010) was directed by Samuel Bayer, who was behind a number of famous music videos (including Nirvana's iconic Smells Like Teen Spirit) and commercials, but never directed any other film before or since.
• The 50-minute experimental film HWY: An American Pastoral was the only film produced, written, and co-directed by Jim Morrison.
• Thursday is the only film directed by Skip Woods.
• Harold P. Warren's one and only film credit is Manos: The Hands of Fate, one of the most famous B Movies ever.
• Kim Henkel was previously a co-writer for the original The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974) alongside Tobe Hooper. So naturally, he was later given the reigns to direct an entry in the franchise. That movie was the disastrous Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Next Generation, and Henkel hasn't directed a movie since.
• The 2008 comedy Beer for My Horses was a Non-Actor Vehicle for country music star Toby Keith (named after his 2003 hit duet with Willie Nelson) and comedian/singer Rodney Carrington. It remains the only directorial credit to date for Michael Salomon, who went back to his regular job directing music videos. Incidentally, the movie is also the only film credit to date for Carrington, whose only other acting credit at all is the 2004-06 Sit Comic Rodney for ABC.
• The 1980 drama Hide In Plain Sight is James Caan's sole directorial effort.
• Nancy Walker's only feature film as director was Can't Stop the Music.
• Acclaimed playwright and screenwriter Robert Bolt tried his hand at directing for the first and only time with Lady Caroline Lamb.
• Eragon is the only movie Stefen Fangmeier ever directed before returning to his usual field in visual effects.
• Kerry Conran's sole directorial credit on a feature film is Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow.
• Gregory Widen's only film is The Prophecy.
• Comedian Tom Green's only directorial effort was Freddy Got Fingered, which he also wrote and starred in.
• The 2001 romance drama What Matters Most is the only film written and directed by Jane Cusumano. Throughout production, she was fighting breast cancer and unfortunately lost her battle mere weeks after finishing the film.
• Stephen Tobolowsky is the epitome of a prolific character actor, but he also made one attempt at directing a feature film, 1988's Two Idiots in Hollywood, a No Budget satirical comedy that sort of plays like an Americanized Withnail and I In the Style of a Paul Bartel movie.
• True Stories is still David Byrne's only feature film as a director. His other directorial credits are music videos and documentaries.^note The above-mentioned Stephen Tobolowsky is credited as a screenwriter on True Stories along with Byrne and playwright Beth Henley, but Tobolowsky says Byrne almost completely rewrote the initial Tobowlowsky/Henley draft of the screenplay
• Escape from Tomorrow is the sole directorial credit of Randy Moore, who vanished off the face of the Earth afterwards.
• After Last Season remains the sole feature film directing credit for Mark Region, who, similar to the aforementioned Randy Moore, also disappeared without a trace after the movie's release.
• The 2000 film Vulgar is the only directorial credit for actor Bryan Johnson.
• Fair Game (1995) is the one and only film directed by Andrew Sipes.
• The 1973 vampire film Lemora is Richard Blackburn's sole feature directing effort, with his one other directing credit being an episode of Tales From The Dark Side.
• Looks like Angry Video Game Nerd: The Movie is going to be James Rolfe's lone directorial credit, since his second film project was postponed indefinitely because of his commitment to his Cinemassacre site, his duties as a father and the COVID-19 pandemic.
• While Motown founder Berry Gordy had a prominent side career as a film producer, the 1975 drama Mahogany was his only film as a director. A star vehicle for Diana Ross (co-starring Billy Dee Williams and Anthony Perkins), Tony Richardson originally was supposed to direct while Gordy produced, but Gordy's Executive Meddling led Richardson to step aside and Gordy took over. It was released to mediocre box office, but Ross's theme song became a #1 hit, and in more recent years the film has gained Cult Classic status.
• Gary Oldman has only directed one film. Nil By Mouth, a deeply grim, profanity-laden film about a dysfunctional family living in East London (allegedly inspired by his own rough childhood).
• Queer photographer, set designer and drag performer James Bidgood only directed the camp cult classic Pink Narcissus. He was displeased with distributor Sherpix's Executive Meddling and unathorized edition of his film and took his name out of it in protest, thus getting credited as Anonymous, and his bad experience trying to film its follow-up made him swear off the film industry altogether. His film was credited to other creators, like Andy Warhol, for three decades, and it would not be re-released with his name until 2003. After several years in hiatus, he eventually went back to photography.
• Sam Borowski, the cousin of actor Danny Aiello, has 2011's Night Club as the only feature-length film he directed. The rest of his filmography are shorts, documentaries or films he produced.
• Angst (1983) is Gerald Kargl's only feature film.
• Icelandinc composer Jóhann Jóhannsson directed one film, Last and First Men, released posthumously two years after his death.

One-Film Screenwriters

• Screenwriter Diane Thomas was discovered by Michael Douglas, wrote Romancing the Stone and then died before she could do another film. There's now a Diane Thomas Screenwriting Award.
• Eagle Vs Shark (which is probably best known as "that movie Jemaine Clement did before Flight of the Conchords") is to date, the only film written by Loren Horsley (although it's not the only one she acted in, it is the only one she starred in.)
• Los Angeles deputy district attorney Lou Holtz Jr. wrote a screenplay called The Cable Guy, and through various connections it wound up in the hands of Chris Farley, then later Jim Carrey. Once Carrey and director Ben Stiller took on the project they brought in Judd Apatow to do a major rewrite. After the film was finished Apatow appealed to the Writer's Guild for a screenplay credit, but they said no (he wound up being credited as producer), so Holtz is the sole credited writer. Holtz went back to being a DA and The Cable Guy is still his only screen credit.
• Stu Silver was a prolific TV comedy writer and producer in the 1970s and 80s (he created Webster and wrote dozens of episodes of Soap), but Throw Momma from the Train is his only feature film screenwriting credit (he did uncredited work on Good Morning, Vietnam).
• The Number 23 is the only writing credit for Fernley Phillips. While he did write an earlier screenplay for the British film U Want Me 2 Kill Him?, he ultimately went uncredited.
• One for the Money remains the only screenwriting credit for co-writer Karen Ray.
• While Brooks Arthur is known as a music producer for the first two The Karate Kid films and various Adam Sandler movies, Eight Crazy Nights is still the only screenwriting credit he has, though he co-wrote it along with Sandler, Brad Isaacs, and Allen Covert.
• Shallow Hal remains Sean Moynihan's only screenwriting credit to date.
• Joseph Cotten had a long and successful career as a Hollywood leading man, acting in movies for forty years. He wrote the screenplay for his third film, Journey into Fear, for his only writing credit.
• Anthony Perkins was a film actor famous for playing Norman Bates in Psycho. Stephen Sondheim is a legendary composer of Broadway stage musicals like Into the Woods. Together, the two wrote the screenplay for 1975 non-musical mystery movie The Last of Sheila. It was the only screenwriting credit either one ever had.
• McCabe and Mrs. Miller is the only feature film writing credit for co-writer Brian McKay. In fact, McKay had worked on the final shooting script of Robert Altman's previous film, Brewster Mccloud, but because of contract agreements couldn't be credited. McKay had a steady TV writing career in The '70s, though.
• Twisted Sister frontman Dee Snider wrote and produced the 1998 horror film Strangeland and has not written anything since, in spite of attempts to make a sequel as recently as 2015.
• Harlan Ellison's one and only produced screenplay was The Oscar (which was technically an adaptation of an earlier novel by Richard Sale), which he later disowned.
• Tom Jankiewicz's only credit is Grosse Pointe Blank, as all the work he found afterwards was as an uncredited script doctor.
• The 2017 film In Search of Fellini is the only feature film written by Nancy Cartwright, who is first and foremost a voice actress. She wrote a single episode of The Simpsons about two years later, but nothing beyond that.

One-Film Producers

• An insurance manager (and eventual fertilizer salesman) named Hal Warren got involved in a bet with screenwriter Stirling Silliphant, in which Warren wagered that he would make a horror film on a shoestring budget, which became Manos: The Hands of Fate.
• Australian actor and politician Ted Hamilton produced only one movie, The Pirate Movie, in which he also played the Pirate King, his only film role. The movie did poorly at the box office and was nominated for nine Razzie Awards (including Hamilton as Worst Supporting Actor), winning three, for Worst Original Song ("Pumping and Blowing", one of two nominated from the movie), Worst Musical Score, and Worst Director.

Illustration

• Barry Godber designed the iconic sleeve cover of King Crimson's In the Court of the Crimson King, as well as a painting on the inner jacket of the album. That album contains the only known artwork of Godber, who died shortly after the album was released.

Logos & Branding

• Eric Zim masterminded the 2009 rebrand of the Nickelodeon channels. It's also his only known logo design credit.

Literature

• The Clever Princess is the only known book written by Diana Coles.
• To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee; she was so afraid that she could never match its success that she never published another book. This has led to some conspiracy theories that someone else wrote it, such as Truman Capote. 2015 saw the publication of her "second" book, Go Set a Watchman, which was actually an earlier attempt at writing about an adult Scout and an older Atticus that was eventually abandoned in favor of Mockingbird. The book's publication was controversial, with some critics arguing that Lee was being taken advantage of and no longer able to judge whether her juvenilia were fit to be published.
• Gone with the Wind was Margaret Mitchell's only novel. It is, however, quite the Doorstopper.
• Bridget Zinn died of cancer before her only novel, Poison, was published.
• Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights (she died of tuberculosis a year after publishing the book). Her only other published works were several poems that were published after her death.
• Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar (she also, of course, wrote many poems, and at least part of the reason she never wrote another novel was that, well, she committed suicide shortly after The Bell Jar was published.)
• Rachel Klein, The Moth Diaries.
• Anna Sewell, Black Beauty; she died shortly after the book was published.
• Boris Pasternak, Doctor Zhivago. (Pasternak was primarily a poet, though, and in Russia is mainly remembered as one.)
• Chris Fuhrman, who died from cancer as he was finishing his sole book, The Dangerous Lives of Altar Boys.
• Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa's only novel, The Leopard, published posthumously in 1958, is a classic in Italian postwar literature (he did also write four short stories/novellas, also published posthumously, three of which are sequels of sort to The Leopard (references are made to the Salina family which is the focus of that novel)).
• Ralph Ellison's only novel was Invisible Man. He tried to avert this trope by writing a second novel, Juneteenth; it has only ever seen publication in greatly abridged editions, as he managed to write 2,000 pages in it without considering it finished. He did publish many essays and a book of short stories, though.
• Leonard Gardner, Fat City
• Stephen Gately of Boyzone fame, The Tree of Seasons. He abruptly died the very day he sketched out how the book would end.
• Cyril Connolly, The Rock Pool.
• The Fathers (by Allen Tate).
• John Okada, No-No Boy.
• Vanessa Duriès finished and released only one book, the BDSM classic Le Lien (released internationally as The Ties That Bind) before dying in a car accident at the age of 21. Another book, L'Etudiante, was left unfinished with its five completed chapters published posthumously.
• The Book of Margery Kempe, written by... Margery Kempe.
• John Kennedy Toole was a one-book author for awhile, but not even in his lifetime - he committed suicide before A Confederacy of Dunces was even published. After his mother died in 1989, however, publishers released his sole piece of juvenilia, The Neon Bible, a novel Toole wrote when he was 15. Oddly enough, despite A Confederacy of Dunces being far better known and acclaimed, The Neon Bible has had a film adaptation, whereas plans to adapt the former have never escaped Development Hell—usually because the suitable leading men (viz, genuinely funny large comic actors) keep dying: first John Belushi, then John Candy, and then Chris Farley, were all set to play Ignatius J. Reilly and then died before the project could move forward. A theatrical adaptation was mounted in Boston in 2015, starring Nick Offerman as Reilly.
• Ross Lockridge spent the better part of a decade writing the 1,088-page Doorstopper Raintree County (best described as Gone with the Wind meets Ulysses). It was published to mostly good reviews and sales in 1948, but depression, writer's block and possibly a pan in The New Yorker drove him to suicide a few months after it was published. A decade later the novel was adapted into a would-be epic film.
• Save Me The Waltz, Zelda Fitzgerald's only novel. Her complete works, including the play, short stories, and magazine articles she wrote, still only fill a medium-sized paperback.
• Austin Tappan Wright's utopian novel Islandia. He worked on the project for years strictly as a hobby; a heavily-condensed version was published after his death in an automobile accident.
• A Canticle for Leibowitz, by Walter Miller Jr. After the book's publication in 1960, Miller isolated himself for 36 years and never wrote another book, though at the time of his suicide he was at work on his second novel, which had to be finished by a ghostwriter and posthumously published.
• Portuguese poet Cesário Verde only had one book published. This is because his poems read as modern ones and 19th century romantic society simply didn't like it.
• M.L. Humphreys. Some people believe that this was the pseudonym of a more-prolific author, but - in lieu of any hard evidence to support this - he (or she) fits under here. His/her only written work was a short story called The Floor Above, mainly remembered today because it was one of H. P. Lovecraft's favorite horror stories.
• While Oscar Wilde wrote many plays and short stories, The Picture of Dorian Gray was his only novel.
• Carl Sagan was a prolific author of many books on science and scientific inquiry, but Contact was his only novel.
• Science fiction/horror writer Bob Leman published short stories over a couple of decades, but his entire output is collected in the average sized short story collection Feesters in the Lake & Other Stories, which is now almost impossible to find due to its publisher going under.
• The Perks of Being a Wallflower is Stephen Chbosky's first novel, released way back in 1999. Nowadays he does a lot more work in film, more often than not doing screenplays, and in 2012 winding up as the sole writer and director for the film adaptation of the book. His second book, Imaginary Friend, wouldn't release until twenty years after Wallflower.
• While Jaroslav Hašek's body of work is quite extensive, he was primarily a journalist, and his legacy mainly consists of newspaper articles and short stories. His only novel, a satirical anti-war epic The Good Soldier Švejk, was only half finished at moment of the author's death from tuberculosis at the age of just 39.
• French author Alain-Fournier published his only novel, Le Grand Meaulnes (released in English translation as The Wanderer and The Lost Domain, among other titles) a year before he was killed in action during World War One.
• While Koushun Takami had a long career in journalism, his only novel is Battle Royale.
• Harry F. Saint worked on Wall Street as he decided to write Memoirs of an Invisible Man. Saint was considering becoming a full-time writer, but apparently just resting on all the cash his book made (just the film rights were $1.3 million) seemed better. Even learning where the guy wound up is hard.
• Jim Theis is only known for writing the infamous So Bad, It's Good fantasy novella The Eye of Argon at the age of 16. It was his only book, since the book's infamy ruined his reputation, causing him to refuse to write anything else until his death in 2002.
• Parodied on the cover of I Am America (And So Can You!), which proudly proclaimed above the title that it was "From the author of I Am America (And So Can You!)"
• Keri Hulme, the first New Zealander to win the Booker Prize, has to date published only one novel, The Bone People. Other than that, she is mostly a poet and short story writer.
• Collections of his screenplays have been published, but Altered States (1978) was Paddy Chayefsky's only novel.
• Henry Roth wrote the classic Call It Sleep in the 1930s, and then nothing else for decades. (Then he wrote a series called Mercy of a Rude Stream.)
• T.E.D. Klein published a single novel - The Ceremonies. He did start a second novel in the eighties and hopes to complete it.
• A more grim example comes in the form of Mendal W. Johnson. While writing his first book, Let's Go Play at the Adams', Johnson, originally a recovering alcoholic, took up drinking again because of the book's extremely bleak look on the nature of human cruelty putting a toll on his mental state. Johnson would end up dying two years after the novel's publication in 1976 from cirrhosis of the liver, making Let's Go Play the only book he ever wrote before his untimely death.
• Voice actress Fumie Mizusawa—better known for her role as Erika Kurumi aka Cure Marine in HeartCatch Pretty Cure!—also happens to have authored a single light novel called Kagurazaka G7: Gakeppuchi Cafe Kyuushutsu Sakusen Kaigi.
• Otherwise prolific literary critic Harold Bloom wrote a single novel, The Flight to Lucifer (a Spiritual Sequel to A Voyage to Arcturus, and an Author Tract about Gnosticism), which he later repudiated.
• Caedmon is known for his eponymous hymn, the earliest known poem in the English language. It is his only surviving work.
• The Ship That Sailed to Mars is the only work of William Timlin. The illuminated book was first published in 1923 and Timlin always intended to craft a sequel, The Building of a Fairy City, but died before he completed it.
• To this day, How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild, and Got a Life appears to be the only novel Kaavya Viswanathan has written and published (though at the time she stated she'd written other stories besides Opal Mehta). After all the hullabaloo over the plagiarism accusations, it's unlikely other publishers would be willing to work with her and the scandal may also have put Viswanathan off from trying to write anything else.
• Anne Frank's sole contribution to literature is her journal, which she was in the process of re-writing for possible publication after the war when she and her family were caught.
• Joan Lindsay wrote several memoirs, short stories and even a children's book, but Picnic at Hanging Rock was her only novel, published when she was 70 years old.
• Katherine Anne Porter was a prolific writer of short stories and short novels, but Ship of Fools was her only full-length novel.

Live-Action TV

• While an acclaimed director, Lars von Trier only created one TV show: Riget.

Tabletop Games

• In 1948, teacher Eleanor R. Abbott designed Candy Land for children who were recovering from polio. The children suggested to Abbott that she could submit the game to Milton Bradley. It was published the next year and became Milton Bradley's best-selling game. However, Abbott never designed any additional games.

Theatre

• Aleksandr Griboyedov and the play Woe from Wit. Being a career diplomat, he dabbled in literature only as a diversion from his orientalist studies and diplomatic services, so his opportunities were naturally limited. During his time there was hope that he would become a true star of Russian literature, but, unfortunately, he died at only 34 years of age protecting the Russian Embassy in Tehran during an uprising, with the event itself fictionalized in the novel The Death of the Vazir Mukhtar.

Video Games

• The only thing people know for a fact about Kikiyama is that she^note we only know she's female because she used female pronouns in one of the few emails from her was the creator of Yume Nikki.
• From the Doom modding community: Leo Martin Lim, author of the 1994 map Doomsday of UAC which pioneered a number of editing tricks, and Haggay Niv, co-author of the acclaimed Hell Revealed mapset from 1997, never produced anything else for Doom.
• Hiroaki Yotoriyama created the Soul Series and nothing else. His only other video game credits are special thanks on an handful of Namco games and rigging motion capture on some of the early Tekken game.
• Katsuhiro Harada, whose one and only body of work is the Tekken series, and a few other minor roles with other Namco games.
• SkiFree remains the only game created by Chris Pirih.
• Danny Ledonne has stated that the game Super Columbine Massacre RPG! would be the only game he would ever make.
• Thomas Happ has contributed to various AAA games, but Axiom Verge was the only game developed independently by him, until his announcement of a sequel.
• Two examples from the Super Mario World modding community:
  • Yuga-XD.MooYUTO created the popular mod Super Mario World Yeah! in 2010, which ended up becoming popular enough to get a raocow playthrough in the same year. However despite the game being well received (in part for its epic final boss and creative level design), it turned out to be the only game Yuga-XD.MooYUTO ever made.
  • SMWFreedoMN was posted online by michael nguyen (mewgynewgy) in 2011, receiving a raocow playthrough shortly afterwards. Like with Super Mario Yeah! though, this turned out to be the last ever game by mewgynewgy too, with the whole site going offline just a year or two later.
• Takeshi's Challenge is the one and only game produced by famous Japanese media personality Takeshi Kitano. Considering the game's own admission that it was made by "Someone who hates video games" and is essentially just Takeshi trolling anyone unlucky enough to buy it, this is probably a good thing. The closest he's ever gotten to returning to the medium was appearing in Yakuza 6 as a major role.
• Japanese journalist Yoshihisa "Kowloon" Kurosawa only made one game, Hong Kong '97, before vanishing into thin air; for a while it was believed that the studio the game was attributed to, HappySoft Ltd, only made that one game as well, only for people to discover that they actually published a second game shortly after Hong Kong '97. According to a 2018 interview from the South China Morning Post, Kurosawa intended to create the worst game ever, and hoped that people would just forget about it.
• Will Crowther and Don Woods made Colossal Cave, arguably the first Adventure Game ever, and nothing else.
• The RPG Maker game Seraphic Blue is the first, and so far only, game made by Tempura/Sakaki.
• Christophe de Dinechin made the first 3D platform game ever, Alpha Waves, and then left the gaming industry, as recounted on his blog.
• Artur Games is a Russian developer that made in 2015 Super Cyborg, a Contra homage that gained a fair amount of success. After that, he mentioned working on a sequel and also showed he was working on a new project, but nothing materialized since then and all he did in the upcoming years was tweaking and improving Super Cyborg.
• Self-taught French developer Emilie Coyo has the Treasure-esque run-n-gun Infinite: Beyond the Mind (2020) as her only credit. She mentioned in an interview that health problems prevented her to make a sequel so far.
• Seba Games Dev (Sebàstian Garcìa) has Fight'N Rage (2017) as his only commercially-released game. It has vague hints of a Sequel Hook, but the man has almost no online presence and has been silent on the matter so far.

Western Animation

• Peter Hannan created CatDog and nothing else, serving as the show's writer, producer, and character designer. The only other thing he was involved with was writing an episode of Pound Puppies (2010) and being co-story editor of Let's Go Luna! .
• The pre-Pixar short The Adventures of André & Wally B. is the only film Alvy Ray Smith ever worked on aside from some CGI effects for Cosmos and Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan. Despite being one of the company's prominent players in its formation, he would eventually leave Pixar after a bad squabble with Steve Jobs and now works as a scholarly writer, computer historian, and digital photographer.
• Pete Williams was the creator of Undergrads, which he also co-wrote and starred in, and hasn't done anything else after its short-lived run.
• Ken Harris has animated almost all cartoons directed by Chuck Jones. However, he has only directed one cartoon throughout his entire career, "Hare-abian Knights".
  • Fellow Looney Tunes animator Irv Spector also has only one direction credit to his name: 1965's Corn on the Cop.
  • Bernard Brown was the sound engineer and composer for a large number of Warner Bros. cartoons from 1933 to 1936, and many more films after leaving for Universal Studios, but only directed two shorts, the Merrie Melodies "Pettin' in the Park" and "Those Were Wonderful Days".
  • Ted Bonnicksen, an animator for Robert McKimson's unit, has only one (co-)direction credit to his name, the 1963 Daffy Duck short Fast Buck Duck.
• Ben Bocquelet created The Amazing World of Gumball, serving as show runner and co-art director. Every professional work he was on before was in advertising. Many of the show's artists had the same background before the founding of Hanna-Barbera Europe (then Cartoon Network Studios Europe), as the United Kingdom produces few animated TV series that aren't for very young children.

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