When Famous Authors Use Not-so-Famous Pen Names

It seems appropriate that the pen name (aka pseudonym, nom de plume, or nom de guerre) itself has multiple monikers. A writer’s motives for adopting one are often clear: women who’ve wanted their work to be taken seriously, journalists who wish to remain anonymous. More puzzling, though, is when an established author chooses to publish as an unknown. J.K. Rowling’s—I mean Robert Galbraith’s—The Cuckoo’s Calling saw its sales numbers jump more than 500,000% when its author’s actual identity was revealed, and Rowling’s not the only writer to start from scratch with a brand-new name. Here some other famous author pseudonyms, along with the motives behind them:
1. The Super Prolific
In the late seventies and early eighties publishers worried about flooding the market with too much of a good thing, which resulted in a strict marketing rule: one novel per writer per year. High-volume writers had no choice but to get around this rule with pen names. Thriller writer Dean Koontz, for example, used eleven of them (!), some of which you’ve probably heard of, or even read (David Axton, Leonard Chris, Brian Coffey, Deanna Dwyer, K.R. Dwyer, John Hill, Leigh Nichols, Anthony North, Richard Paige, Owen West, and Aaron Wolfe).
The restriction on volume didn’t suit the scarily prolific Stephen King—who just released his 50th novel, Dr. Sleep—so he adopted the pen name Robert Bachman in 1977. King decided to try an experiment while he was at it, requesting that very little marketing be done for Bachman’s novels, so he could see whether it was his writing or his brand that was really selling. “Bachman” did well enough to raise reader’s eyebrows, and his true identity was eventually sussed out by clever fans. King later claimed that his alter ego died of “cancer of the pseudonym,” but he did not retire the name: Bachman has appeared as a character in King’s novels, and his books have been “posthumously” published as recently as 2007. King also explored the relationship between author and alter ego in the novel The Dark Half—the alter ego is, of course, a bit sinister.
2. The Reputation Protecter
Isaac Asimov—who wrote over 460 books during his lifetime—was never asked by publishers to slow his roll. But when approached to write a YA sci-fi series intended for television adaptation, the MIT professor adopted the pseudonym Paul French. He wrote six books as French, but as he prepared to write the seventh, the series’ televised future fell through. No longer concerned with the specter of someone else’s bad adaptation, he threw caution to the wind and began to drop overt hints about his identity right into the text of the next book (you’ll have to read the series, and maybe I, Robot, to find out what those hints were).
3. The Genre Jumpers
When you become a giant in your field, it can be difficult to convince readers to trust you with another genre. Agatha Christie and Nora Roberts, queens in their respective fields of mystery and romance, used pen names to swap subjects. Christie wrote romance novels as Mary Westmancott, and Roberts currently releases mystery thrillers as J.D. Robb.
Gore Vidal used the pseudonym Edgar Box to break into genre and save his career. Box wrote several lucrative mystery novels in the late 40s and early 50s, after New York Times book critic Orville Prescott announced his intention, as part of a particularly harsh review of Vidal’s The City And The Pillar, to avoid reviewing Vidal’s next five books. Vidal used Box to sidestep this blatant attempt to force him into obscurity.
4. The Pseudonym Switcheroo
Occasionally, writers will start their careers with pen names, but drop them in favor of their real names before really making their mark. William S. Burroughs published his first novel, Junky, as William Lee; Charles Dickens released his first works as Boz; and Samuel Clemens—while he never went back to his real name—did drop his original pseudonyms, Josh and Thomas Jefferson Snood, in favor of Mark Twain.
Before Michael Crichton answered all our most pressing questions about coexistence with dinosaurs (difficulty level: high) and space illness (difficulty level: even higher), he was just your average student at Harvard Medical School, secretly writing adventure thrillers under the names Henry Hudson and John Lange. He used the pen names to keep the thriller writer separate from the serious Harvard student. Shortly after he graduated, Crichton released his first best seller, Andromeda Strain, under his real name, perhaps thinking, re: his retired pen names, that “At times like this one feels, well, perhaps extinct animals should be left extinct.”
Have you read any pseudonymous works by well-known authors?