Richard Bachman (c. 1945 - April 9th, 1985) was an author of horror fiction and the husband of Claudia y Inez Bachman. In the late 1970s, Stephen King wanted to test how widely recognized and successful his writing style was without using his own name. As a result, he created the pseudonym Richard Bachman and began publishing books under that name. However, in 1985, journalists discovered a connection between the novels of Bachman and King, which led to their publication as the works of Stephen King.
Background[]
At the beginning of Stephen King's career, the limit was that authors could only publish one book a year, or else it would glut the market and would be unacceptable to the public. So King could publish more, he started writing under another name, Richard Bachman.
He was quite nearly named Gus Pillsbury after King's mother's father but was ultimately named after Donald Westlake's pseudonym "Richard Stark" and the band Bachman-Turner Overdrive.
He adopted the name to see if his success was due to talent or luck. King says that he has never fully answered that question because of being outed as Bachman too early. The Bachman book Thinner, the last of the Bachman books before being outed as King, sold 28,000 copies when it was originally published and then about ten times that amount when it was revealed to the public that Bachman was actually King.
The first person to discover that Bachman was King was a bookstore clerk named Steve Brown. While he was reading Thinner he couldn't help but notice the style similarities between the two authors. Brown looked at the publisher's notes at the Library of Congress, which had a document that names Stephen King as the author of one of the Bachman books. Then Brown wrote to King's publishers and attached the documents he had uncovered and asked them how they wanted to proceed. About two weeks later, he received a phone call from Stephen King himself and told Brown to write an article about what he discovers. He also allowed himself to be interviewed.
Having published only five novels, Bachman died in 1985 of cancer of the pseudonym after he was discovered, and his death served as the inspiration for King's 1989 novel The Dark Half. Two further “trunk novels,” written by Bachman, were discovered by Claudia in the attic of their New Hampshire home and subsequently published; the first of them, The Regulators, was released in conjunction with Desperation, as the two books presented different versions of the same story and cast of characters.
The second “trunk novel” Blaze was, in fact, a reworked manuscript that King had written before Carrie and had been turned down by Doubleday in order to publish `Salem's Lot.
Novels[]
- Rage (1977)
- The Long Walk (1979)
- Roadwork (1981)
- The Running Man (1982)
- Thinner (1984)
- The Regulators (1996), posthumous
- Blaze (2007), posthumous
Notes[]
- The novel Misery was originally going to be published as a Bachman book, but the public found out Bachman was in fact Stephen King while he was writing it, so Misery instead was released under King's real name.
Appearances[]
- Bag of Bones (mentioned)
- Song of Susannah (mentioned)
RTB