Pseudonyms

I met a guy the other day named Calvin Knox.

"Calvin Knox" was once a pen name used by sf author Isaac Asimov Robert Silverberg, early in his career. He suspected a publisher of being antisemitic, so he submitted writings under the most un-Jewish name he could think of.

 

I once met a guy named Jack Gardner, which tickled me quite a bit, as Jackson Gardner was the first pen name I ever published under as a teenager.

 

I've never met anyone named Starbuck Newelman. I doubt he exists.

 

The only nome de plumes (ooh!) that come to mind immediately are Richard Bachman/Stephen King, & Ellis Peters/Edith Pargeter. I used to think that S.E. Hinton was a psuedonym, but later found out that Susan Eloise Hinton used her initials to hide her gender since she was writing books aimed mostly at teenage males.

Oh, can't forget Anne Rice/A. N. Roquelaure.

 

I had a sequence of role playing characters as a teen, all called variations of Lucas Grey (modified appropriate to the game genre and locale). Some years later I encountered a guy actually called Lucas Grey, and it took a moment before I realised why it was so familiar.

 

Years ago, I used to buy tobacco from a gentleman named John Carter.
I always hailed him as "John Carter of Cigars!"
He never found it funny.

 

George Eliot (Mary Ann Evans)--the author of the famous Middlemarch--is my favorite pen name, followed by the previously mentioned Richard Bachman, the name by which Stephen King released some of his grittier early novels.

I have several pseudonyms for when I write on other sites: one for technical stuff, one for ridiculous rants and one for professional correspondence.

...like a hermit crab.

 

So I was at the jail yesterday, booking in a warrant. A local pd officer was booking in a guy who had changed his legal last name to sly fox, or slyfox. I didn't get if it was two words or one word. Either way, it fit what he thought of himself as. He also had a little hair tail at the base of his hairline.

 

Back around 1970, at MSU, there was a woman who changed her name to Alicyn Wonderland.