Romain Gary won France's top literary prize twice by becoming someone else
Already a Goncourt winner, Romain Gary took the prize again as Émile Ajar, a persona the jury never connected to him. Pseudonyms have hidden brewers' secrets, women novelists, the authors of the Federalist Papers and whoever invented bitcoin. The word itself comes from Greek for 'false name'.
A pseudonym is a part-time name, worn in one setting while the real one carries on elsewhere. That separates it from a legal name change, which replaces the original for everyone. The category is wide: stage names, pen names, wrestlers' ring names, gamer tags, popes' and monarchs' regnal names, and the 'cadre names' Communist leaders like Lenin and Trotsky used. Alias, its Latin cousin, originally meant 'at another time' or 'elsewhere'.
Writers have many motives. The Brontë sisters published as Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell partly to hide that they were women and partly so neighbours would not spot themselves in the books; Mary Ann Evans became George Eliot. The traffic runs both ways, since some male romance novelists adopt female names. Stephen King wrote as Richard Bachman to disguise how much he produced, Nora Roberts switches to J. D. Robb for crime, and Winston Churchill added his middle initial so readers would stop mixing him up with a namesake American novelist, which never fully worked.
Science has its masked figures too. Sophie Germain published mathematics under another name to sidestep 19th century prejudice against women, while William Sealy Gosset did so because his employer, Guinness, did not want its brewing methods exposed. Copernicus first circulated his sun-centred model anonymously. Satoshi Nakamoto, author of the bitcoin white paper, remains unidentified, as do the real names behind some pen names that have held for decades, such as Elena Ferrante.
Shared names add another twist. Madison, Hamilton and Jay signed the Federalist Papers as Publius, and historians still cannot pin a few of the essays on one author. Ellery Queen was two cousins' joint byline and also their detective. Anonymity is harder to keep than it looks: stylometry, which compares writing habits, can link a pseudonymous author to other work, and the risk grows as software and text collections improve.
Source: Pseudonym
