Word: pseudonyms
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Last week Cecil Day-Lewis, 63, a former Oxford professor known to the public as much for his 19 competent whodunits (under his pseudonym, Nicholas Blake) as for his poetry, became Britain's 18th poet laureate. And who knows? The pen of a still vigorous, thoughtful contemporary could turn a new page in Britain's national poetry-or scratch its final, deadening quatrain. The rangy, resonant-voiced Day-Lewis (who has only lately begun hyphenating his two surnames), seemed determined to broaden the scope of his office...
Imprisoned for political offenses under Louis XV, Francois Marie Arouet changed his name to Voltaire in order to make a fresh start as a writer. The Rev. C. L. Dodgson used the pseudonym Lewis Carroll because he thought it beneath the dignity of a clergyman and a mathematician to write a book like Alice in Wonderland. Mary Ann Evans (George Eliot) and Lucile-Aurore Dupin (George Sand) used men's names because they felt women au thors were discriminated against in the 19th century. These days, pseudonymity is again in vogue, but the reasons are hardly as compelling...
...turned out to be that chronic spoof John Kenneth Galbraith, who recently carried pseudonymity to its logical extreme by reviewing the pseudonymous Report from Iron Mountain under the pseudonym Herschel McLandress. One of the mysteries of the 1962 Vatican Council was the man named Xavier Rynne who wrote so knowingly of the proceedings for The New Yorker; it later developed that a Catholic theologian, Father Francis Xavier Murphy, then residing in Rome, did much of the writing. One author who has so far escaped detection is Raymond...
William Randolph Hirsch. Whatever pseudonyms may do for the individual ego, editors still insist that there are practical reasons to use them. For 50 years, Hearst papers used the byline Cholly Knickerbocker to cover several writers. The single name, editors found, gave the column an identity it would not have had if the names had kept switching. When Society Columnist Aileen Mehle came along, she was dubbed Suzy Knickerbocker, and she took the name with her when she joined the New York Daily News. Then, too, when a publication runs more than one piece by the same person...
...would be the perfect way to enact a final exorcism of the demons, rid his mind and body once-and-for-all of drugs and liquor. Backed by a family fortune which had previously sustained his drug habit, Rooks cast himself in the lead part (giving himself a pseudonym, Russell Harwick), and went to work in 16mm, deciding 6 months later to do it up proud and shoot professionally in 35mm. Only a few of the original shots remain, indicated by a black strip of masking on screen right-or-left revealing that the 16mm frame was blown up double...