Tons of authors use pseudonyms for various reasons, but mostly, it’s not a big secret. Evan Hunter/Ed McBain (was that ever even a secret?) etc. Sometimes they only use a pseudonym (Trevanian) but I guess if you did it right nobody would know.
But has any author ever used a pseudonym and nobody ever figured out who the person really was? Even after they died?
Just wondering. “Anonymous” got outed, so did JK Rowling, people seem to work extra hard on it when it’s a mystery.
(I mentioned in this thread a question about ways you could set up a corporation that could never be traced to you, and it seems like that might work. But I guess all bets are off if you have to involve a law firm…someone will slip.)
I am sure there are lots of obscure authors who no-one remembers and whose works were so little read that no-one cared enough to crack their pseudonym. B. Traven, however, was quite well known in his day, and a major, classic Hollywood picture was based on one of his books. Nevertheless, despite there being several theories about his identity, no-one is sure of it to this day.
Rowling was outed? Don’t be silly. A book that had gotten good reviews and sold only 1500 copies. (I am a coauthor of a highly technical book that has sold just over twice that.) An anonymous Twitter note from an account that has subsequently disappeared. And an immediate admission from a Rowling agent, instead of the automatic denial one might have expected.
I do pity the publisher. They were obviously not expecting this. They have now ordered a new printing, but it will take a couple weeks to print, bind, and get into the bookstores, by which time everyone who wants will have bought the e-book.
Incidentally, the book was reviewed yesterday by Michiko Kakutani in the NY Times and she obviously loved it. Which is interesting since she panned the previous one, describing it as Peyton Place meets Little Whinging. She also loved the Harry Potter books.
I don’t think it’s obvious that Kakutani would have given a positive review to The Cuckoo’s Calling. When the author was known only as Robert Galbraith, it got really good reviews.
I don’t know how much stock you can put in that “sold only 1500 copies” figure; it’s been discussed in the Cafe Society thread about the book.
There have been, and still are, people who claim that Shakespeare’s plays were actually written by someone else. I don’t know that any of them have a strong enough claim that this one counts as “unsolved.”
Not an “anonymous Twitter note” at all. The tweet was sent from an account in the person’s real name, Judith Callegari, who is a friend of someone who works for the law firm.
Nothing sinister or planned about it, just people not being able to keep a big juicy secret that they picked up from work.
Tons of individual books have authors whose true identities are not known, or at least not positive. Thousands of cheap paperbacks were ground out from the 40s on. If you want to go back further, the same problem applies to hundreds, maybe thousands, of pulp stories. Most of the less respectable ones were written under pseudonyms or house names. A lot of progress has been made in matching titles to real names, but that hasn’t been done for all. Even higher-class erotica like The Olympia Press has a few authors whose identities aren’t certain. A woman using the pseudonym of Ataullah Mardaan wrote Kama Houri and Deva-Desi, now rare collectibles. Publisher Maurice Girodias swore she was a real person, but no trace of her has ever surfaced. Most people think that one of his regulars wrote the book. If she is real, her name went to the grave with them.
There are some tricky identity problems even where the author is known. Take the case of Lewis Padgett. That’s known to be one of the joint pseudonyms that sf writers Henry Kuttner and C. L. Moore used after they married. Except that we also know that they didn’t always work on the same story that got sent out as a Padgett. For the paperback reprint of Robots Have No Tails, Moore wrote an introduction stating flatly that she never wrote a word of any of those stories. What about the rest of their “joint” work? Some are known, most aren’t.
Salvatore Lambino legally changed his name to Evan Hunter in 1952. He revealed he was Ed McBain as early as 1958. But he was also Hunt Collins, Curt Cannon, Richard Marsten, Ezra Hannon, and John Abbott. And nobody knows if he wrote any books as Dean Hudson, which is a great example of the point I made above:
That footnote goes to an Earl Kemp article that discusses the controversy and the denial. It’s great reading. Click over there now.
Were the identities of the authors of the various pamphlets, letters, etc., from peri-revolution America 1770’s and 1780’s), ever all determined (i.e. the ones that often took a Latin nom-de-plume)? Not the authors of the Federalist Papers, but along those lines.
In the late 1950s, an author who used the pen name Betty Martin wrote two best-selling books, “Miracle at Carville” and “No One Must Ever Know”. These were autobiographical and told the story of her diagnosis with Hansen’s disease (AKA leprosy) and its eventual cure and her life after leaving the Louisiana facility where she, and later her husband, lived for many years.
He died in the 1990s and she just died a few years ago, in her 90s. AFAIK, her real name was never revealed even though at least one book was written about Carville after her death.
In time, the Leprosarium was closed and the facility was used as a minimum security prison by the state of Louisiana. It was destroyed in Hurricane Katrina.
