previous            A–Z            next        Stephen King Pseudonym:        Richard Bachman A new work by Stephen King (1947), whose books have sold more than 500 million copies worldwide, is a reassuring promise of success to his publisher. It’s also critic-proof. Yet in the late 1970s, feeling hemmed in by his phenomenally prolific output, King introduced the pen name Richard Bachman. As he later said, it was easy to add someone to his interior staff: ‘The name Richard Bachman actually came from when they called me and said we’re ready to go to press with this novel, what name shall we put on it? An I hadn’t really thought about that. Well, I had, but the original name – Gus Pillsbury – had gotten out on the grapevine and I really didn’t like it that much anyway, so they said they needed it right away an there was a novel by Richard Stark on my desk, so I used the name Richard, and that’s kind of funny because Richard Stark is in itself a pen name for Donald Westlake, and what was playing on the record player was ‘You Ain’t Seen Nothin’ Yet’ by Bachman Turner Overdrive, so I put the two of them together and came up with Richard Bachman.        King’s practical measure to avoid saturating the market (and avoid openly competing with himself for sales) was a success. But in 1985, a bookstore clerk in Washington, D.C., did some detective work and exposed King’s secret. The author subsequently issued a press release announcing, Bachman’s death from ‘cancer of the pseudonym’. King dedicated his 1989 novel ‘The Dark Half’ (about a pen name that assumes a sinister life of its own) to ‘the late Richard Bachman’. See also Richard Stark. Source: Ciuraru, C. (2011), ‘Introduction’, Nome de Plume, A (Secret) History of Pseudonyms, p.XX previous            A–Z            next