It is now fairly common knowledge that best-selling horror novelist Stephen King sometimes uses the pseudonym Richard Bachman for publishing his novels. So far, the novels Rage, Roadwork, The Long Walk, The Running Man, Thinner, and The Regulators have all been published by King as Richard Bachman. In 2007, Blaze, a new Richard Bachman novel was published.
Long before Stephen King's "official" first novel, Carrie was published he had written two novels called Getting It On and The Long Walk, which he couldn't quite manage to get published. After the successes of Carrie and Salem's Lot, King (obviously in a stronger position) decided to resurrect what he considered were his other good books.
On the advice of his publishers, who cautioned King on the dangers of over-saturating the market, Getting It On (renamed Rage) was published under the pseudonym of Richard Bachman, and a new author was born.
According to King, choosing Richard Bachman's name was a fairly straightforward, if somewhat expedient, process. "The name Richard Bachman actually came from when [the publisher] called me and said we"re ready to go to press with this novel [Rage], what name shall we put on it? They said they needed it right away and there was a novel by Richard Stark on my desk so I used the name Richard … and what was playing on the record player was "You Ain't Seen Nothin' Yet" by Bachman Turner Overdrive, so I put the two of them together and came up with Richard Bachman."
According to King, "Richard Bachman began his career not as a delusion but as a sheltered place where I could publish a few early books which I felt readers might like. Then he began to grow and come alive, as the creatures of a writer"s imagination so frequently do."
"Richard Bachman… did develop a personality and a history to go along with the bogus author photo… and the bogus wife (Claudia Inez Bachman)… Bachman was a fairly unpleasant fellow who was born in New York and spent about ten years in the merchant marine after four years in the Coast Guard. He ultimately settled in rural central New Hampshire, where he wrote at night and tended to his medium-sized dairy farm during the day."
"I began to imagine his life as a dairy farmer... his wife, the beautiful Claudia Inez Bachman... his solitary New Hampshire mornings, spent milking the cows, getting in the wood, and thinking about his stories... his evenings spent writing these stories, always with a glass of whiskey beside his Olivetti typewriter."
Of course, being Stephen King, there were the almost mandatory gruesome incidents to accompany the biography. "The Bachmans had one child, a boy, who died in an unfortunate accident at the age of six (he fell through a well cover and drowned). Three years later a brain tumor was discovered near the base of Bachman"s brain; tricky surgery removed it. And he died suddenly in February of 1985."
As King's comments reveal, Richard Bachman is far more than just a mere pseudonym (he is a person, a persona, an alter-ego) created by King, complete with his own biography, family, life, death, and with a posthumous literary reputation based on seven published novels, two of which have been made into films. King notes: "Bachman [was] a fictional creation who became more real to me with each published book which bore his by-line."
In many ways, Richard Bachman is the most successful character that Stephen King has created; primarily because Richard Bachman is an integral part of who Stephen King is. Consequently, Bachman has not only influenced the way King writes, but what he writes, and how and when he writes.
Recently, King has commented on the lifelike existence of Bachman: "Probably the most important thing I can say about Richard Bachman is that he became real. He took on his own reality, that"s all, and when his cover was blown, he died. I made light of this in the few interviews I felt required to give on the subject, saying that Richard Bachman had died of cancer of the pseudonym, but it was actually shock that killed him… Put another way, Bachman was the vampirish side of my existence, killed by the sunlight of disclosure.'
'And then these news stories came out saying "Bachman is really King," and there was no one (not even me) to defend the dead man, or to point out the obvious: that King was also really Bachman, at least some of the time.'
King has given a variety of reasons for his creating Richard Bachman. One reason is because he felt he needed another outlet for his writing due to his prolificacy; he was writing novels too quickly for his publisher, who was unable to keep up with his prolific output.
