The Writer’s Chronicle Fails to Consider That Pseudonyms May Reflect An Author’s Multiple Personality

In the September 2014 issue, Ronald Goldfarb, in “Writing Under Another Name,” discusses the historical, social, commercial, and deceptive reasons that authors have used pseudonyms or pen names. The closest he comes to any psychological reason is when he quotes one writer as saying that she “wanted to escape from my own identity.”

Goldfarb assumes that fiction writers have only one psychological identity, and that a pseudonym is just another name for that same identity. As one example, he mentions that J. K. Rowling switched to a male pseudonym when her novels changed from Harry Potter to detective fiction. 

The problem is, Rowling initially claimed that she used a pseudonym so that her new book would be judged apart from her fame, on its own merit. But then she continued to use the pseudonym even after everyone knew.

And since her Harry Potter and detective fiction are such different genres, I can’t see why anyone would assume that they were written by the same mentality—unless you mistakenly thought that one identity is all that most fiction writers have.

In this regard, please see my April 26, 2014 post, “Edgar Allan Poe’s Multiple Personality in Both His Fiction and His Real Life”—search “Edgar Allan Poe” in this blog—for an example of when an author’s alternate personality used a pseudonym and got its letters-to-the-editor published.

Thus, in addition to the reasons that Goldfarb gives, I would add that authors use pseudonyms because they have more than one identity who wants to publish.