Frank Richards, one of 25 pseudonyms of Charles Hamilton, puts Joyce Carol Oates to shame: He was much more prolific, the most prolific author in history.

“Charles Harold St. John Hamilton (8 August 1876 – 24 December 1961) was an English writer, specializing in writing long-running series of stories for weekly magazines about recurrent casts of characters, his most frequent and famous genre being boys' public school stories, though he also dealt with other genres. He used a variety of pen-names [twenty-five, according to tomorrow’s New York Times Book Review], generally using a different name for each set of characters he wrote about, the most famous being Frank Richards for the Greyfriars School stories (featuring Billy Bunter)…It has been estimated by researchers Lofts and Adley that Hamilton wrote around 100 million words or the equivalent of 1,200 average length novels, making him the most prolific author in history” (Wikipedia).

Hamilton’s autobiography is titled “The Autobiography of Frank Richards,” as though Frank Richards were a person in his own right.

Pseudonyms have been a recurrent topic in this blog, because alternate personalities often have their own names.

Postscript: My title would have been more correct to say that Charles Hamilton (not Frank Richards) is the most prolific author in history. I guess I was thinking about the fact that the only autobiography written by Hamilton, judging by the title, was by and about Frank Richards, as though Richards, not Hamilton, were the person's regular, host personality.

Postpostscript: Was his Charles Hamilton personality a writer? If so, was he not the kind of writer who would write an autobiography?