The Writing Post

Writerly pseudonyms have benefitted the writing community since the inception of publishing. In fact, the colloquial “pen name” comes from using pseudonyms. Consider: J.K. Rowling used the name Robert Galbraith following Harry Potter’s success; Agatha Christie used her own name for her mystery novels, while she used Mary Westmacott for her romance novels. In this post, we are going to talk about horror icon Stephen King’s famous pen name (as there are a spat of upcoming films), Richard Bachman.

Richard Bachman’s Background

At some point in his career, Stephen King became enamored with a possibility: what if I could release similar novels under a different name? The idea was to test the theory of talent vs luck. In King’s eyes, was he really talented as a horror author, or was he in the right place at the right time? Another issue King addressed with Bachman dealt with common publishing practices at the time: authors usually only published one novel per year to avoid saturation. Bachman solved this issue as King now had the opportunity to write and publish more novels each year. And, Bachman did just that.

Initially, King adopted the name Gus Pillsbury, which came from his maternal grandfather. However, that name was figured out fairly quickly, and so he dropped it.

As King put it: “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? And I hadn’t really thought about that … so they said they needed it right away and there was a novel by Richard Stark on my desk so I used the name Richard … 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.”

A Richard Bachman (fictional) Biography

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Richard Bachman, as King explained, was a farmer-turned-writer who lived in New Hampshire with his wife, Claudia Inez Bachman. Unfortunately, they had a child who died after falling into a well and drowning. In later interviews, King revealed that Bachman’s face had become ravaged by cancer, which prevented him from public appearances and made him “one ugly son of a bitch.” Bachman also survived a brain tumor that had to be removed from the base of his brain, but still eventually succumbed to “cancer of the pseudonym.” Which, as we know, is not a real disease, but rather a play on Bachman’s very existence. As such, Bachman’s death had a lot to do with King being outed as the writer behind the pseudonym.

In his lifetime, Bachman wrote eight books. These included:

1. Rage (1977)
2. The Long Walk (1979)
3. Roadwork (1981)
4. The Running Man (1982)
5. Thinner (1984)
6. The Bachman Books (1985, collection)
7. The Regulators (1996)
8. Blaze (2007)

Revealing Bachman

A Washington D.C. bookstore clerk, Steve Brown, stumbled upon the real identity of Richard Bachman after noticing many similarities between Bachman’s books and King’s. Particularly, he was reading an advanced copy of Thinner (1984). His curiosity took him to the Library of Congress, where he checked the copyrights on Bachman’s novels. Kirby McCauley’s name appeared, who was King’s agent, and then King’s name appeared alongside Rage, Bachman’s first book. After sending a “letter detailing what (he) had found,” for the master of horror, Brown was contacted by King himself.

“This is Steve King,” the author stated over the phone while Brown was at work. “Okay, you know I’m Bachman, I know I’m Bachman, what are we going to do about it? Let’s talk.”

According to Brown, they spent multiple nights discussing the situation over the phone. Brown noted that King kept his sense of humor the whole time. With the ruse revealed, King’s Bachman books now feature the dual names, or “King writing as Richard Bachman.”