It’s well-known by now that the author “Richard Bachman” is actually the pseudonym ofStephen King, and while this was revealed years ago, the way he was outed is like something out of one of King’s own novels. King has been writing so much for so long that he’s become a load-bearing pillar of pop culture. Whether through his books, or the many, manymovie and TV adaptations of Stephen King’s books, like Spider-Man or Michael Jackson, his name is known far and wide, in every country and across multiple generations.
Of course, that level of fame comes with a certain amount of scrutiny and even a few drawbacks. It’s partly what ledStephen King to create the Richard Bachman pseudonymin the late 1970s. He’d likely have continued writing under that pseudonym for far longer, too, had an intrepid reader not blown his cover after doing a smart bit of detective work.
A Fan Started Noticing Similarities Between Stephen King’s & Richard Bachman’s Writing
King Could No Longer Hide His Voice
Stephen King has a very particular voice that his Constant Readers know well. Though his style of writing has evolved over the years, as anyone would expect of a prolific author whose career has spanned half a century, he still has a blue-collar way of constructing his sentences that shines through. Likewise, there are key turns of phrase that can only come from Stephen King just as much as his repeated themes. Particularly in his earlier years, King had a bag of regular phrases from which he’d regularly pull in his novels.
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It was those very specific turns of phrase that first piqued the attention of one longtime reader, Steve Brown, in 1984. The bookstore clerk, who also moonlighted as a writer and fanzine editor, was an avid fan ofStephen King’s booksand devoured all his books – enough so that when he was reading Richard Bachman’s book - specifically an advance copy of 1984’sThinner- he started noticing some very specific phrases that he’d only ever read in Stephen King’s books. That started his wheels turning, and he became convinced that Bachman was actually a pseudonym King was using. So he started doing some digging.
He Looked At The Library Of Congress To Find Trademarks Filed
Brown Soon Got An Unexpected Call
That digging took Brown to the Library of Congress, where, in a genius move, he looked up the copyrights for each of the Richard Bachman books. All of them, save for one, were registered to Kirby McCauley, who, in a connection that Brown knew could not be coincidence, was Stephen King’s agent at the time. But the final proof he needed was that the copyright of the very first “Richard Bachman” book,Rage, was registered to Stephen King himself. With the proof in hand, Brown called McCauley directly and told him he knew that the rising megastar author was the one behind the Richard Bachman name.
“Steve Brown? This is Steve King. Okay, you know I’m Bachman, I know I’m Bachman, what are we going to do about it? Let’s talk.”
To Brown’s surprise, it wasn’t McCauley who got back to him, but Stephen King himself. One day, the phone rang, and when Brown picked it up, the man on the other end said something the bookshop clerk could never have imagined: “Steve Brown? This is Steve King. Okay, you know I’m Bachman, I know I’m Bachman, what are we going to do about it? Let’s talk.” (viaWashington Postarchive) And just like that, the cat was out of the bag.
“I never thought much about working at keeping Bachman a secret. I didn’t have to,” explained King. “But when ‘Thinner’ came out, it was like carrying your groceries home in a shopping bag in the rain. Gradually the bag softens and begins to tear. Things start falling out.” For eight years, Bachman’s publisher, New American Library, had managed to keep King’s secret, but rumors that King was Bachman had constantly dogged the author from the start. By the time Brown confirmed it through the copyright record, King realized the jig was up, and he came clean. He jokingly “killed” Richard Bachman, and a print ofThinnersoon hit shelves with the credit “Stephen King writing as Richard Bachman”.
Why Stephen King Used The Richard Bachman Pseudonym
There Was A Twofold Reason
It all leads to the question of why Stephen King started using a pseudonym in the first place. The answer was simple: King wanted to challenge himself and prove to himself and others that he was a great writer and that people bought his books because of his writing, and not just because of name recognition. In a way, it was like an aspiring actor eschewing the “nepo baby” label and not taking the last name of their very famous actor father or mother, instead trying to earn their auditions and any roles they land on their own merits and talent and not because of the association with their parents.
That’s how it was with King, who, by the time he publishedRage, his first book under the Richard Bachman pseudonym, in 1977, and certainly by the time he publishedThe Long Walkin 1979, was already a rockstar author. By the timeRage(which King has since pulled out of print)came out, King had already publishedCarrie,‘Salem’s Lot, andThe Shining, and by the timeThe Long Walkwas published, he’d also releasedThe Stand. Even if those books had been bad, he was already a huge name in the literary world and knew people would buy his books no matter what, so he adopted a second pen name to test himself.
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Another reason for his adoption of the Richard Bachman pseudonym was to get around the publishing industry’s general rule at that time of publishing one book per year per author, a rule fictional protagonist Mike Noonan even referenced in King’s 1998 novel Bag of Bones. The thinking was that an author publishing more than one book a year would risk overexposure to the public and the oversaturation of the market would lead to people getting bored with the author’s name. So King, ever a prolific writer, came up with the Bachman solution to enable him to publish more than one book a year.
Stephen King Has Written 8 Books As Richard Bachman (But Not Since 2007)
He Later Found Two Manuscripts In The Attic
Though King was outed all the way back in the ’80s as Richard Bachman, he did still write two more books under his mostly defunct pseudonym: 1996’sThe Regulators, and 2007’sBlaze. In the foreward toThe Regulators, there was a cheeky explanation from the book’s editor that the manuscript had been written by Richard Bachman before his “death,” but it had recently been discovered by his widow in a trunk.
1977
1979
1981
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1984
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1996
Blaze
2007
A similar explanation was given forBlaze, which King said on his website that he’d found in a trunk in the attic. As King explained in the afterword to 1982’s collectionDifferent Seasons,Blazehad actually been written beforeCarrie, but Doubleday wanted’Salem’s Lotto be his second book. So King threw the manuscript forBlazeinto a trunk, where it remained for decades until King pulled it out and rewrote and punched up before publishing it under the old pseudonym he’d originally wanted to publish it under years ago.
With those two books, the original five Richard Bachman novels, andThe Bachman Bookscollection that bound together his first four Bachman books,Stephen Kingpublished a total of eight books under the Richard Bachman pseudonym. It’s likely that King will never publish another under the Bachman name, at least not unless he finds another lost manuscript squirreled away in a box somewhere. Still, it’s a really fun part of the author’s lore. It would have been interesting to see how long he could have kept up the ruse had it not been for a curious bookstore clerk in 1984.
