THE MARK TWAIN
SYNDROME
Having a successful career just isn’t enough for some authors. Some are so prolific that they adopt a pen name just to write even more books.
Author: Daniel Handler
Also Known As: Lemony Snicket
Details: Handler writes novels for adults under his own name, but writes children’s books under his pen name…and they’re tremendously more successful than the novels. As Lemony Snicket, he published the A Series of Unfortunate Events books, a mock-gothic, darkly humorous collection about the hard-luck Baudelaire orphans, pursued by the wicked Count Olaf, who is after their supposed inheritance. (Lemony Snicket is also a character in the series, serving as an omniscient, lovelorn narrator.) More than 65 million Snicket books have sold, which is about 64 million more than Handler’s six books, which includes a collection of short stories called Adverbs; a violent novel about a withdrawn teenage girl who becomes a pirate, called We Are Pirates; and the experimental Watch Your Mouth, which is about incest and takes the form of an opera.
Authors: The Brontë sisters—Charlotte, Emily, and Anne
Also Known As: Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell
Details: In 1846 Charlotte Brontë sent a batch of her best poetry to Robert Southey, the poet laureate of England, for his review. Remarkably, he read them and responded. Less remarkably, he didn’t like them…because the author was a woman. “Literature cannot be the business of a woman’s life,” Southey wrote, “and it ought not to be. The more she is engaged in her proper duties, the less leisure she will have for it, even as an accomplishment and a recreation.” Brontë got so mad that she took some of those same poems, along with those written by her equally literary-minded sisters, Emily and Anne, and submitted them to a London publisher called Aylott and Jones. The company had no problem with female writers, but that could be because Brontë left that information out. She submitted the manuscript as Poems by Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell, deriving male pseudonyms that shared the first initial of the names of each sister. The book sold only two copies (really), but all three sisters continued to publish under their pseudonyms, including the classic novels Jane Eyre (Charlotte), Wuthering Heights (Emily), and Agnes Grey (Anne).
All the spiders in the world eat more each year than all the whales in the world.
Details: King is almost as well-known for the number of books he publishes (and which often push 1,000 pages) as he is for his classic tales of horrors and frights, such as It, The Stand, The Shining, Misery, and Carrie. He wrote so many books when his career took off in the 1970s that his publishers refused to print more than one King novel a year, fearing that so much material would cannibalize sales. So King started writing novels under the name of Richard Bachman. That way he could double his output without putting too many “Stephen King” novels into bookstores. Among the most popular works of “Richard Bachman”: The Running Man and Thinner.
Author: Agatha Christie
Also Known As: Mary Westmacott
Details: Christie is probably the greatest crime and mystery writer ever, ushering in the concept of the “popular novel” as we know it with such page-turners as Murder on the Orient Express (1934) and Death on the Nile (1937), both featuring the genius Belgian detective Hercule Poirot. (She also wrote the stage play The Mousetrap, which has been continuously running in London since 1952.) She wrote 66 novels (most of them best-sellers) and 14 short story collections as Agatha Christie. But she also wrote six romance novels under the name of Mary Westmacott; she used the pseudonym so as to not confuse audiences into thinking they were about to buy a salacious crime story. The works of “Westmacott” include Giant’s Bread (1930) and Absent in the Spring (1944).
Author: Isaac Asimov
Also Known As: Paul French
Details: Asimov could be the most prolific major author of all time, having penned more than 40 novels (among them such science-fiction classics as I, Robot), and nearly 300 nonfiction books about science and the world around us. He was also a professor, on staff at the Boston University School of Medicine. In 1951 Asimov reluctantly agreed to Doubleday & Co.’s request that he write a sci-fi novel for kids, which would also be adapted into a TV show. Television in the early 1950s wasn’t exactly art. In fact, Asimov thought the TV offerings of the day were “uniformly awful” and he didn’t want to be associated with it. But he loved to write…and he loved to get paid, so he agreed to write the book (David Starr: Space Ranger) under the name of Paul French. The TV series never happened, but “Paul French” wrote a total of six David Starr books.
“I would rather have written Cheers rather than anything I’ve written.” —Kurt Vonnegut
Details: By 2013 there probably wasn’t a more famous author in the world than J. K. Rowling. As the author of the staggeringly successful Harry Potter books—all seven volumes rank in the top 20 best-selling novels of all time—Rowling became the first billionaire writer. The release of the latter Potter books became cultural events in the English-speaking world, with details of their plots carefully guarded, leading up to bookstores around the globe opening at midnight for parties and celebrations to get the book to fans as quickly as possible. That put a lot of pressure and attention on Rowling, who, at the end of the day, was still just a person trying to write a decent novel. After the last Potter book hit the stores in 2007, she wrote and quietly published a mystery novel for adults under the name Robert Galbraith, which Rowling later said was “a liberating experience. It has been wonderful to publish without hype or expectation, and pure pleasure to get feedback under a different name.” The novel, The Cuckoo’s Calling, was a flop before the secret of its author was out…and a best-seller after.
A RANDOM BIT OF FACTINESS
First packaged mix sold: Aunt Jemima Pancake Flour (1889).