Romain Gary won France's top literary prize twice by inventing a second author
The rules of France's most prestigious literary prize forbid winning it twice. Romain Gary managed it anyway: in 1973 he began writing in a new style as Émile Ajar, even getting his cousin's son to play Ajar in public. He confessed only in a manuscript he sent his editor shortly before his death in 1980.
A pen name is simply a name an author prints in place of their own. English speakers began saying pen name in the 1860s, in Bayard Taylor's writing, while the posh-sounding nom de plume is not really French at all. According to the Fowler brothers, it was an English back-translation; the French themselves say nom de guerre, which apparently baffled English readers who expected war to have nothing to do with writing.
Motives vary widely. In 1899 the British politician Winston Churchill signed himself Winston S. Churchill to avoid confusion with an American novelist of the same name. Stephen King released four novels as Richard Bachman because publishers doubted readers would buy more than one book a year from him, until critics spotted the stylistic fingerprints. Pearl Gray became Zane Grey because his real name felt wrong for Westerns. Theodor Geisel adopted Dr. Seuss after being barred from his college humour magazine for drinking, and used Theo. LeSieg, Geisel reversed, for books he wrote but did not illustrate.
Gender has driven many choices. Nineteenth-century women often wrote as men to be taken seriously: Mary Ann Evans became George Eliot, and the Brontë sisters published as the Bell brothers. Later authors in male-dominated genres used initials, as J. K. Rowling did, before she added a second disguise, Robert Galbraith, for crime novels. Secrecy protects others: the former SAS soldier behind Bravo Two Zero wrote as Andy McNab, and Brian O'Nolan used Flann O'Brien because Irish civil servants could not publish political writing. Elena Ferrante's name still shields its owner.
Some names belong to no single person. Alexander Hamilton, James Madison and John Jay shared Publius for The Federalist Papers, evoking a founder of the Roman Republic. Nancy Drew's Carolyn Keene was a house name used by many writers, and James S. A. Corey of The Expanse fuses two collaborators' middle names with the initials of one's daughter. Nicolas Bourbaki, author of rigorous mathematics texts, is a whole group of mathematicians.
Source: Pen name
