5 Famous Authors Who Switched Genres

Ian Fleming, Chitty Chitty Bang Bang
Fleming wrote about 10 billion spy novels: After all, he’s the creator of James Bond. He laid out the template for the modern, frothy spy novel, combining international espionage with sex, martinis, and ski chases. He died in 1964, but other writers have just kept writing James Bond novels, because there was a lot of 007 demand to be filled and further 007 movies to be made. But toward the end of his life, Fleming tried branching out from spy novels with a book that is the polar opposite of what he was known for, and yet also remaining cinematic and irresistible. Yes, Fleming wrote Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, the classic kids’ book about a magical flying car.

Douglas Coupland, Worst. Person. Ever.
Is there a more “’90s” author than Douglas Coupland? He literally helped define a generation. No, really, his almost plotless first novel, Generation X, about three aimless friends in their 20s, gave that generation of Americans its name. He followed it up with more quiet, thoughtful, and zeitgeist-defining novels throughout the decade that spoke to the rootlessness, disconnect, and emptiness felt by those born in the ’60s and ’70s, such as Microserfs and Girlfriend in a Coma. But time marched on, and as Gen X took their spots atop the world, Coupland had to move on to explore more current cultural matters. He also got wacky. In 2013, he published Worst. Person. Ever. It’s a farce about a terrible guy named Raymond Gunt (really), a reality show cameraman upon whom one bad thing after another happens.

Roald Dahl, My Uncle Oswald
A childhood without access to Roald Dahl books is a sad childhood. Few authors can speak to children or understand them the way Dahl did, addressing their anxieties about the bigness, cruelty, and nonwhimsicalness of the adult world in classics like Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, James and the Giant Peach, The BFG, and The Witches. Dahl also wrote a book for adults. My Uncle Oswald is a comic erotic novel with the very adult plot of a woman who seduces men, steals their semen, and then sells it to single women who want to get pregnant.

Thomas Harris, Black Sunday
Harris is one of the most successful horror and crime writers of all time, even though he’s only published four books in the genre. But they were a big four: the series of novels about super-genius cannibalistic serial killer Hannibal Lecter that have been turned into Oscar-winning box office smashes and the acclaimed NBC series Hannibal. Harris published the first book in the series, Red Dragon, in 1981, and has never looked back. But we did, and we found that the only book in his bibliography that isn’t a gory look into the mind and practices of serial killers is his 1975 debut novel, Black Sunday. Playing like an episode of a ’70s cop drama or an ’80s cop movie, Black Sunday is also about bad people doing bad things, but it’s about a rogue blimp pilot who plans to blow up the Super Bowl.

T.S. Eliot, Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats
It’s the thing that Eliot did as a spot of fun for which he is probably best known. Okay, well, maybe not—he’s best known for his Modernism-defining masterworks of poetry such as The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock and The Waste Land.  But the thing that came out of Eliot’s remarkable brain with which the average person would be most familiar is Cats. The cheesy musical about singin’, dancin’ purrin’, and dyin’ cats, many of whom are quite jellicle, is based on Eliot’s non-narrative poetry collection, Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats. A lot of the characters and ideas are there (poem titles include “The Rum Tum Tugger” and “Mr. Mistoffelees”), but it is not something that Eliot took entirely seriously. At all. He wrote the poems off and on in the ’30s, and included them in letters to the children of friends and his godchildren, attributing them to an imaginary figure named “Old Possum.” Andrew Lloyd Webber loved the book so much, he found a way to make an extremely successful musical out of it.
What other famous authors have written books in other genres?