Hard Telling Not Knowing each week tries to answer your burning questions about why things are the way they are in Maine — specifically about Maine culture and history, both long ago and recent, large and small, important and silly. Send your questions to [email protected].
A new voice burst onto the literary scene in 1977: Richard Bachman, whose debut novel, “Rage,” about a disturbed teenage boy in Maine, hit shelves to both controversy and praise.
Bachman, who kept a low profile, wrote four more books: “The Long Walk,” “Road Work,” “The Running Man” and “Thinner.” Biographical details about the author were sparse; he lived on a dairy farm in New Hampshire, he’d served in both the U.S. Coast Guard and Merchant Marine, and his wife was named Claudia. That’s about it.
Eagle-eyed readers began to notice that some details weren’t adding up. Why was Bachman dedicating his books to people in Maine? Why did the writing in his books seem oddly similar to other authors? Just what was the deal with Richard Bachman?
Many people suspected they had the answer, but it took a bookstore clerk in Washington, D.C., to finally get to the bottom of it. Forty years ago this week, it was revealed that Richard Bachman was the pen name of none other than Stephen King.
The clerk, Steve Brown, had noticed similarities between King and Bachman’s writing style. Brown tracked down the publisher’s records for Bachman’s books at the Library of Congress and found a document that included King as the author of one of the books. In January 1985, Brown wrote to King’s publishers, and King called him personally, suggesting Brown write an article about his findings. Not long after that, King went public with the news, and a Washington Post article by Brown soon followed.
King said he’d sometimes been careless with disguising Bachman’s identity, especially with the dedications in the books, including one for Shawn Littlefield, a Hampden man and friend of King’s who died.
“You know how when you’re carrying home some groceries in the rain and the whole bag just kind of falls apart? Well, that’s how it’s been with Bachman lately,” King told the Bangor Daily News the day the news officially broke.
In the Bangor area, anyone with the wherewithal could easily have figured out King’s pseudonym.
At Fogler Library at the University of Maine, one of the Bachman books on file included a notecard that plainly stated King was the author. And at the Bangor Public Library, for years all of Bachman’s books were listed as being written by King. When a librarian there personally asked King if that was correct, King reportedly told them not to list Bachman books under his name — without confirming or denying the two authors were one and the same.
King chose to publish books under the Bachman pseudonym for two major reasons. The first was that publishers frowned upon releasing more than one book per author per year, and seeking to keep up with his prolific pace without saturating the market, he began publishing under a different name.
The other reason is that King wanted to see if his writing was good on its own, and if his astronomical success with books like “Carrie,” “‘Salem’s Lot” and “The Stand” was due to talent, or merely to luck. King said he never really got an answer to that question, since Bachman was unmasked too early. If he hadn’t been outed in 1985, the next Bachman book would have been “Misery,” now considered one of King’s best books.
The first Bachman book, “Rage,” went out of print in 1998. The book details a Maine high school senior who commits a school shooting. After a school shooting in Kentucky in 1997 in which three students died, it was found that the shooter had a copy of “Rage” in his locker. King said he would let the book go out of print not long after.
When a collection of Bachman books was published in an omnibus, King said in an introductory essay that his Bachman was “a fictional creation who became more real to me with each published book which bore his byline.” He even played an unrelated character named Bachman in a cameo role on the TV show “Sons of Anarchy.” The Bachman alter ego also famously inspired King’s 1989 book “The Dark Half,” about a Maine author who writes violent crime novels under a fake name that becomes all too real.
Despite his secret being busted, King published two more books under his pen name, “The Regulators” in 1996, and “Blaze” in 2007, with King saying both books had been “discovered” by Bachman’s widow. In the author’s bio, it was noted that Bachman had died from “cancer of the pseudonym, a rare form of schizonomia.”
