Currently reading: but is it good?

Henrik Ibsen, Pillars of Society
The Lady from the Sea
Little Eyolf

Canonization is a tricky thing. There is the overall question of who is remembered and who is forgotten, but there is also the question of how works are assigned status within one author's output. The problems are complicated when the author does not write in English and is reliant on market trends to determine what gets translation and what doesn't. I had finished off Dostoevsky's major novels and most of the short stories when I learned there were many other novels and stories (not frequently translated); I worked my way back into Tolstoy through an old translation of Hadji Murat; there are newish volumes of Turgenev and Pushkin to support essays of the "actually, author x was best known for type of writing y and not for his novels". And that's just Russian, for which the market has been somewhat consistent over time.

If you know Ibsen at all, it's A Doll's House. Perhaps A Master Builder on account of the movie. There are a few others that are well anthologized, and you'll have no trouble finding them: Ghosts, An Enemy of the People, The Wild Duck, Rosmersholm. They are all of them justifiably famous, and if you have spent the last several months (as I have) reading through 20th century American drama, the Ibsen of these plays is all over it: strong personalities, predictable but devastating twists, a politics that mostly seems very current but will go off in odd little eddies for no discernible reason. 

There are five plays that are almost never anthologized: Pillars of Society, The Lady from the Sea, Little Eyolf, John Gabriel Borkman, and When We Dead Awaken. And let me tell you, as an appreciator of Ibsen, the first three plays, at least, are not very good at all. Pillars of Society attempts the reversals An Enemy of the People will later do better; The Lady from the Sea tries to make A Doll's House less ambiguous, to no good effect; Little Eyolf tips over the line to melodrama because we simply have no reason to care whether the sketch of a child lives or dies. (Spoiler: he dies.)

It's sometimes the case with prolific authors that an abundance of lesser work crowds out the good, but I don't think that's what going on here. It's just an odd--perhaps not that odd--instance of the general perception of Ibsen's work being entirely correct.

Still, it's nice to be able to check for yourself.