Occasionally, pen names crop up in television. Robin Maugham, nephew of Somerset, published The Wrong People as David Griffin (if you know the book, you’ll know why). The Brontë sisters moonlit as the Bell brothers for similar reasons. Mar y Ann Evans wrote as George Eliot to disguise her sex. Historically, pseudonyms offered a neat way to sidestep prejudice and outrage. Sometimes they use pseudonyms sometimes the simple soubriquet “Anonymou s” (a catch-all nom de plume, not to be confused with the excellent poet). Amongst this group, we have the whistleblowers, the incognito contributors brave enough to publish insights into the mayhem currently thundering through our institutions. The secret out, sales of Thinner jumped from tens of thousands to over a quarter of a million.įor plenty of other writers, the revelation of their true identity presents more serious consequences than a sudden uptick in sales. King’s justification for the caper was simple curiosity. Four other Bachman books followed, culminating in Thinner in 1982, before his cover was blown by an inquisitive reader who recognised King’s style and looked up the novel’s copyright in the Library of Congress. In 1977, King published Rage, a psychological thriller, under the pseudonym Richard Bachman. Simply getting published - or, in television and radio, getting made - generates a certain momentum.Ī writer who has enjoyed a reasonable amount of commercial success is Stephen King. The problem is that, as well as sweeping away any failures and embarrassments, a pseudonym erases any successes, too. It would detach one from an acreage of queasy reviews and ugly head shots. I imagine such a wheeze crosses every writer’s mind.
You don’t leave a can of gasoline where a boy with firebug tendencies can lay hands on it.I’ve been thinking for a whilst about a pseudonym. Yet I did see ‘Rage’ as a possible accelerant which is why I pulled it from sale. “My book did not break (them) or turn them into killers they found something in my book that spoke to them because they were already broken. These were unhappy boys with deep psychological problems, boys who were bullied at school and bruised at home by parental neglect or outright abuse,” he wrote in “Guns,” (via USA Today). “It took more than one slim novel to cause (the shooters) to do what they did.
However, shortly after the deadly school shooting in Newtown, Conn., in 2012 at Sandy Hook Elementary School, King published a 25-page nonfiction essay titled “ Guns” in which he explained his reasoning for pulling the novel. King did not immediately respond to Fox News’ request to discuss the book.
Shortly after the 1998 incident, King is said to have called his publisher to demand the book be taken out of print.
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