Literary Deep Cuts: 10 Obscure Works by Famous Authors By Harmony Gibson

Literary Deep Cuts: 10 Obscure Works by Famous Authors

By Harmony Gibson

From Great Expectations to The Lord of the Rings, literary greats are often defined by and renowned for their most famous works. But what about their other, lesser-known stories? The ones that might defy the expectations of readers who only know them for those most notable titles?

This article is all about highlighting lesser-known works by celebrated literary authors and encouraging readers to discover overlooked masterpieces beyond the established favorites. They’re the weird ones, the entirely unexpected or vastly different and tonally varying stories that have flown under the radar, yet are just as deserving of being discovered as the works that made these authors literary giants.

1. The White Company by Arthur Conan Doyle

Sherlock Holmes remains possibly the most well-known literary detective in history. Conan Doyle is known primarily for his Victorian mystery series, and the character has inspired countless detective novels, spinoffs, and retellings in the centuries that followed. But what if I told you that Holmes isn’t the only thing Conan Doyle was interested in?

The White Company is almost the opposite of what you’d expect from the master of the slow-burn, investigative, pipe-and-reading-chair ambience of Holmes. A sweeping historical adventure set during the Hundred Years’ War, it follows a young man named Alleyne as he leaves the monastery where he was raised and travels into the world, eventually joining a company of mercenaries and knights bound for France. Along the way, he becomes a squire, falls in love, fights in battles, and is eventually knighted.

It’s a much more traditional adventure story than Holmes, full of medieval battles, chivalry, romance, and larger-than-life characters. It’s a fascinating glimpse into another side of Conan Doyle, who clearly had just as much interest in medieval adventure as he did in Victorian mysteries.

2. The Star Rover by Jack London

When you think of Jack London, you probably think of rugged wilderness, survival, and sweeping adventures in the American frontier. But The Star Rover is something much stranger.

When university professor Darrell Standing is sentenced to life in prison for killing a fellow professor, he is restricted to solitary confinement and subjected to a torturous device known as “the jacket,” a canvas jacket that is tightly laced around his body. In order to cope with the torture, Standing learns to enter a trance-like state in which he experiences out-of-body lives and travels across time and space.

The story is part science fiction, part mysticism, and part social commentary on the brutal treatment of prisoners at the time. Published in 1915, it diverges greatly from London’s most famous works, which often focus on the Western frontier and more sweeping adventures. Instead, The Star Rover is deeply introspective, strange, and philosophical, turning extreme physical confinement into a kind of imaginative freedom. Despite its divergence from London’s expected tone, the work stands alone in its singularity and memorability just as well as his other works.

3. Heart of a Dog by Mikhail Bulgakov

Bulgakov is one of the great Russian literary figures, most well known for his politically divisive and bizarre work The Master and Margarita. While Heart of a Dog certainly aligns with his usual scathing satire and wacky concepts, it seems to be a lesser-known work of his despite being just as masterful in its execution.

At just over a hundred pages, this novella begins from the perspective of a stray dog wandering the streets of Soviet Russia. When he’s taken in by a doctor with experiments in mind, the doctor and his colleagues are shocked when their transplant of human organs into Sharik, the dog’s body, is successful, only to find that the results are more catastrophic than they could have realized.

It’s bizarre, darkly funny, and unmistakably Bulgakov, making it one of those rare lesser-known works that feels like a secret extension of everything that makes an author famous in the first place.

4. The Machine Stops by E.M. Forster

E.M. Forster is best known for his social dramas like Howards End and his romances like A Room with a View. While he never shied away from social commentary within his works, perhaps his most unexpected story is a short one scarcely mentioned.

The Machine Stops is a vast science fiction short story in which humans live underground after the surface of Earth has become uninhabitable, and humanity has become entirely dependent on machines, with no use for travel, human interaction, or even physical movement. The Machine provides everything they need, and over time, people begin to worship it almost as a god.

The work is dark and deeply relevant, especially now, despite being published in 1909. It’s bleak and haunting, with lush prose, profound philosophical ideas, and themes that continue to feel strangely familiar. It’s a work I think everyone should read at least once in their life, one that stays with you long beyond the 40 pages it takes to tell.

5. Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc by Mark Twain

Known as one of the great American novelists and satirists, it’s surprising to learn that Mark Twain took a great interest in the life of Joan of Arc. Initially published in 1896, Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc was presented as the memoir of Sieur Louis de Conte, a fictionalized version of Joan’s page, and was framed as a translation from an ancient French manuscript.

Twain takes liberties with the story, but the major events of Joan’s life are treated with unusual seriousness and reverence. The result is a read that at once entertains the reader and esteems its subject.

That reverence is perhaps the most unexpected part of the book. The author best known for satire, humor, and irreverence wrote what is arguably one of his most earnest works about a teenage French military commander who would eventually become a saint. It’s a very different side of Twain from the one most readers encounter in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer or Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.

6. Farmer Giles of Ham by J.R.R. Tolkien

If you’re a fan of medieval fantasy but don’t necessarily want to commit to the sweeping epic of The Lord of the Rings, Tolkien’s smaller work might be for you.

Farmer Giles of Ham might not be the sprawling epic that The Lord of the Rings lends itself to, but Tolkien’s signature character work and lovely prose are just as present in this humorous medieval fable. The story follows a simple farmer whose quiet life is uprooted after he accidentally drives away a giant. The villagers mistake him for a great hero, and his newfound reputation eventually leads him into an encounter with a dragon.

The story follows more of a simplistic fable format and takes place in a grounded medieval setting, albeit one still filled with fantastic beasts, magic, knights, and plenty of Tolkien humor. It’s much lighter and more playful than The Lord of the Rings, but it still carries the same affection for medieval storytelling and the strange, almost mythological quality of Tolkien’s worlds.

7.  The Man Who Lived Underground by Richard Wright

Richard Wright is best known for Native Son and Black Boy, works that established him as one of the most important American writers of the twentieth century. But The Man Who Lived Underground takes Wright's usual social realism into something far more surreal and psychologically strange.

The story follows Fred Daniels, a Black man who is falsely accused of murder and forced to flee into the sewers beneath a city. Living underground, he begins to observe the world above him from a distance, stealing from the people who live there and gradually becoming more detached from ordinary society.

What begins as a story of racial injustice becomes something almost dreamlike and existential. The underground world becomes a strange reflection of the society above it, allowing Wright to explore guilt, morality, alienation, and the dehumanizing effects of oppression through an almost surreal lens. It’s a much stranger work than the Wright most readers know, and one that feels surprisingly modern in its psychological darkness.

8.  The Sea Fairies by L. Frank Baum

When most people think of L. Frank Baum, they think of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. But Baum wrote dozens of other fantasy stories, many of which have been almost completely overshadowed by Dorothy, Toto, and the Yellow Brick Road.

The Sea Fairies follows a young girl named Trot and her companion, Cap’n Bill, a retired sailor with a wooden leg. After Trot wishes to see a mermaid, her wish is granted, and the two are taken into an underwater world inhabited by sea fairies and strange creatures.

It’s a charming and bizarre little fantasy that feels distinctly Baum despite taking place far away from Oz. There are mermaids, magical kingdoms, talking creatures, and even an octopus who is horrified to discover that he has become a symbol of the Standard Oil Company. It’s exactly the kind of strange, whimsical world-building that makes Baum memorable, just without the yellow brick road.

9.  The Man Who Laughs by Victor Hugo

Victor Hugo is often associated with the sweeping historical drama of Les Misérables and the gothic tragedy of The Hunchback of Notre-Dame. But The Man Who Laughs is perhaps one of his strangest and most grotesque works.

The novel follows Gwynplaine, a young man who was disfigured as a child and left with a permanent smile carved into his face. He grows up as a traveling performer alongside a blind girl named Dea and a philosopher named Ursus, eventually discovering that he is actually the heir to an aristocratic family.

Like much of Hugo’s work, the story becomes much larger than its strange premise. It explores class, poverty, beauty, social status, and the ways people are turned into spectacles for the entertainment of others. It’s melodramatic, gothic, bizarre, and at times almost grotesque in its imagery, making it a very different experience from the more familiar Les Misérables while still displaying Hugo’s fascination with social injustice and the extremes of human experience. Ultimately, despite being a lesser famous work of Hugo’s, it’s been said to inspire the infamous Joker comic character that’s become an icon of pop culture for decades.

10. Out of the Silent Planet by C.S. Lewis

Last but not least, you may know C.S. Lewis from his most famous work, The Chronicles of Narnia. But did you know the author also wrote a vast science fiction trilogy just as fantastical and immense?

Out of the Silent Planet follows Elwin Ransom, a philologist who is kidnapped and taken from Earth by spaceship to the planet Malacandra, which humans know as Mars. There, he becomes fascinated by the strange customs and creatures he encounters and gradually realizes that the alien world is not the savage place his captors imagined it to be.

Eventually, the plot develops into a spiritual and philosophical epic exploring morality, humanity, and the nature of the soul in an entirely fantastical way that rivals the likes of Paradise Lost. The book is especially interesting for readers who know Lewis primarily through Narnia because it shows how deeply his fascination with theology, morality, mythology, and other worlds extended beyond children’s fantasy.

Beyond the Famous Works

Some of these books are strange, some are serious, some are funny, and some seem to have almost nothing in common with the works their authors are remembered for. But that's exactly what makes them worth discovering.

Sometimes an author's lesser-known work is simply a forgotten masterpiece. Other times, it offers a completely different perspective on the writer we thought we knew. And sometimes, it's just fascinating to discover that the author of Sherlock Holmes wrote a medieval war epic, that Mark Twain wrote a reverent novel about Joan of Arc, or that the creator of Narnia also imagined an alien civilization on Mars.

The most famous work by an author doesn't necessarily tell us everything about them. Sometimes, you have to look a little further down the bookshelf to find the weird ones.