Here’s a childhood question for you. And I should qualify that—for the most part I’m talking to people who were kids in the 60s, and who shared the books they read with their own children.  Here’s the question: What do Carolyn Keene, Franklin W. Dixon, Kenneth Robeson, Laura Lee Hope, and Victor Appleton have in common? Hopefully some of those names resonate with you. The answer is that they’re all well-known authors to anyone who read The Bobbsey Twins, Hardy Boys, Doc Savage, the Campfire Girls, The Happy Hollisters, and a few others. The other thing they have in common? None of them exist, and they never did. They’re all pseudonyms.

Authors have used pseudonyms for a long time, and for all kinds of reasons. Sometimes they wrote  a new book that’s way outside of the genre they’re known for, and were afraid that it might dilute their main literary brand. Sometimes they wrote controversial content, and didn’t want it to be associated with their real name. Sometimes they had an important message that they wanted to share, but because the message was counter to prevailing opinion, or highly controversial, they chose to write under a pseudonym. For example, Silence Dogood,  Caelia Shortface, Martha Careful, Richard Saunders, Busy Body, Anthony Afterwit, Polly Baker, and Benevolus were all pseudonyms of none other than Benjamin Franklin, who was often at odds with prevailing politics. He was one of only a few early American authors who, as a man, wrote under a female pseudonym, and he usually did so to criticize the patriarchy. Another example is newspaper columnist Joe Klein, who wrote the very controversial book about Bill Clinton’s presidency called Primary Colors under the name Anonymous.

Other good examples are the authors Aaron Wolf, Anthony North, Brian Coffey, David Acton, Deanna Dwyer, John Hill, Leigh Nichols, Owen West, and Richard Page, all of which are pseudonyms used by none other than the blockbuster bestseller author of horror, Dean Koontz. He writes across many different genres, and his publishers were concerned early-on that having his name associated with books from different genres might dilute his main fan base, so they convinced him to write under different names. He’s written well over 100 novels, so I guess he can be forgiven. And it must be working, because he and his wife live in a 14,000 square foot home in Shady Canyon, the most exclusive gated community in Southern California. 

Other well-known writers have used pseudonyms as well. Stephen King, for example, wrote under the name of Richard Bachman. Others include Theodore Geisel, who we know as Dr. Seuss; Samuel Clemens, who wrote as Mark Twain; Mary Westmacott, better known as Agatha Christie; Eric Blair, who wrote 1984 as George Orwell; Marguerite Annie Johnson, whose poetry graced us as the work of Maya Angelou; Robert Galbrath, whose alter-ego, JK Rowling, gave us Harry Potter; and the well-known Snowqueens Icedragon, better known as E. L. James, who wrote the Fifty Shades series. Her real name is Erika Leonard. We also have J. D. Robb, who is the same person as Nora Roberts; Mother Goose, whose real name was Jeannette Walworth; and for anyone who enjoyed such terrific espionage books as Shibumi, The Eiger Sanction, The Loo Sanction, The Main, and The Summer of Katya, all written by the mysterious author Trevanian, we now know him to be the late Rodney William Whitaker, a well-respected film critic and the chair of the Department of Radio, TV and Film at the University of Texas at Austin.

Interesting, right? But there’s more to the pseudonym story. Not only do individual writers use pseudonyms, but so do entire publishing houses. One of the best known for this practice was the Stratemeyer Syndicate. Founded in the late 1800s, the company published under its own name until 1984, when it was acquired by Simon & Schuster. From the beginning, Stratemeyer published mystery book series for children, including Tom Swift, Rover Boys, Hardy Boys, the Bobbsey Twins, and quite a few others. 

But they weren’t published under the names of the actual authors; they were published under what are called house names, which are owned by the publisher, not by the author. This allowed them to use a stable of writers to create content under a single name, thus reducing their dependence on a single creative individual.

Here are some examples.

[Maxwell Grant was the name credited with writing the famous Shadow series, but he was actually five authors: Walter Gibson, Theodore Tinsley, Lester Dent, Bruce Elliott, and Dennis Lynds, who took turns writing the stories. Lester Dent had a successful career as the author behind the Doc Savage series, published by Street and Smith, although some of the titles in the series were written by Phillip Jose Farmer. The books were credited to house name Kenneth Robeson.

Jerry West was the author of the popular series, The Happy Hollisters; the actual author was Andrew Svenson, who wrote all the books in the series.

Victor Appleton was another house name used by Stratemeyer, under which they published the Tom Swift series, one of my favorites when I was a kid—in fact, I just bought a whole collection of them. In actuality, they were written by writer and broadcaster Howard Garis, who used several pen names including Laura Lee Hope for some of the Bobbsey Twins books, Clarence Young for the Motor Boys, Marion Davidson for the Camp Fire Girls series, and Lester Chadwick, under which he wrote a series called Baseball Joe. Interesting to me is that Garis also created a beloved character from my own childhood, Uncle Wiggly. During his long career, Garis wrote more than 15,000 Uncle Wiggly stories, which were published six times a week between 1910 and 1947.

So, there you have it—a peek behind the curtain at the seamy underbelly of the 20th century publishing industry. I had no idea.