August 11, 2025, 12:34pm
Many of our best writers have played the fake name game. Call it what you will—an alias, a pseudonym. But from Samuel Clemens to She-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named, we can find a gamut of wily writers determined to evade the postman. Or possibly, the IRS.
In her 2011 book, Nom De Plume: A Secret History of Pseudonyms, Carmela Ciararu considered the purposes a pen name can serve. Some are obvious. Like privacy, or the fact that women writers in slightly earlier centuries might have required a masculine alias to publish at all. Others have played the alias game for weirder reasons. Like genre trespass, the champagne problem of market over-saturation, and—seemingly, in some cases—just to be silly.
Can we separate the author from their output? Better femmes have tried. If it’s all in a name, say we start there. How well do you know your heroes?
1. Mary Ann Evans is the government name of
A) Emily Brontë.
B) Louisa May Alcott.
C) Lucy Maud Montgomery.
D) George Eliot.
2. Stephen King has also published thrillers under the name
A) Michael Douglass.
B) Rudolf Steiner.
C) Richard Bachman.
D) Matthew Haig.
3. Eric Arthur Blair was a soldier in
A) the Troubles.
B) World War II.
C) the Spanish Civil War.
D) the Falklands War.
4. Which of the following homies sometimes wrote under the pseudonym, “Man Without a Spleen”?
A) Anton Chekhov
B) Tao Lin
C) Chris Adrian
D) Greg Tate
5. Ramona Lofton’s best known book is probably
A) Oreo
B) Push
C) The Number One Ladies’ Detective Agency
D) All About Love
6. Which of the following monikers did Benjamin Franklin NOT employ?
A) Busy-Body
B) Silence Dogood
C) Richard Saunders
D) Diedrich Knickerbocker
7. Kimitake Hiraoka typically publishes/published under the name
A) Seichō Matsumoto.
B) Yukio Mishima.
C) Jun’ichirō Tanizaki.
D) Mieko Kawakami.
8.Who dis?
A) Currer Bell
B) Claire Morgan
C) Nancy Boyd
D) Margaret Atwood
9. José Rizal also wrote under the name(s)
A) May Pagasa.
B) Laong Laan.
C) Dimasalang.
D) All of the above.
10. “JT LeRoy” was
A) a dubious literary persona used by author Laura Albert.
B) the fabricated subject of a story by journalist Janet Cooke.
C) another pseudonym for James Frey, novelist/memoirist.
D) the given name for the poet Amiri Baraka.
Congratulations! If you didn’t know before, now you do. Writers be fictionalizing in these streets. What’s your nom de plume?
Answers: 1(D); 2(C); 3(C)—image credit,”The Mule Track,” Paul Nash; 4(A); 5(B); 6(D)—Close. But Diedrich was Washington Irving; 7(B); 8(B); 9(D)—image credit, “Untitled,” Richard Prince; 10(A).