Stephen King is undoubtedly the most successful horror writer of the modern age, but his sheer prolificacy led him to create the Richard Bachman pseudonym in order to produce even more output. The Bachman pen name remained an enduring part of King's celebrated career, demonstrating the author's impressive ambition. The Master of Horror even used the alias in later works after the secret had long been revealed due to its prominence among his body of work.
Stephen King adopted the identity of Richard Bachman fairly early on in his career, but he was nevertheless popular enough to sell copies of his books based on his name recognition. The author had already enjoyed success upon the release of his first three novels, Carrie, 'Salem's Lot, and The Shining, as they reached bestseller lists. However, King's intense writing habits were able to grant him the ability to produce more than just one novel in a year's span. His next work, the epic The Stand, was on its way to being published a year after The Shining was released in 1977, with more on the way after that.
At the time, there was the strange notion that if a writer like King published too much material over the course of a short span of time, the content would oversaturate the market. Publishers believed that if an author released more than one book in the same year, the overabundance of material spelled doom for the author. King proved this theory wrong later on in his life, but he first had to come up with a way to publish his written material that his publishers declined to accept.
Where Stephen King Used His Pen Name (Richard Bachman)
According to Stephen King himself in the introduction to The Bachman Books collection, the pseudonym was also a way of seeing how successful his writing could be without relying on his public image. Combining crime novelist Donald E. Westlake's pen name of Richard Stark with the rock band Bachman-Turner Overdrive, King secretly created Richard Bachman and published a completed manuscript of Rage in 1977 under the new identity. Publisher New America Library released four more Bachman novels, The Long Walk in 1979, Roadwork in 1981, The Running Man in 1982, and Thinner in 1984.
Although King initially created Richard Bachman to experiment with literary ideas under the veil of secrecy, the author elaborated on his alter ego's character to create a more comprehensive author bio. Apparently, Bachman wrote his novels by night, working on his dairy farm in New Hampshire during the day. He lived with his wife Claudia, mourned his son who had died at a young age in an accident, and underwent surgery for a brain tumor that isolated him from interviewers. King also included a picture of his agent's insurance broker on the inside folds of the books.
It was the supernatural horror Thinner that caught the attention of a keen bookstore clerk in Washington, D.C. named Steve Brown, who noticed the similarities in writing between the two authors and discovered the copyrights for Bachman within the Library of Congress. King, who planned on publishing Misery under his pen name, cheekily declared Bachman dead due to "cancer of the pseudonym". However, the alias' legacy lived on in later works that Bachman's widow "discovered" in his attic, The Regulators in 1996, and Blaze in 2007. Stephen King's other creative side was also the main inspiration for The Dark Half, which is about an author who meets an incarnation of his malicious alter ego.