The Man Who Came Back
- THE MAN WHO CAME BACK - A black ink and black color pencil drawing on an 11 x 14 size coquille board. This drawing illustrates the story, "The Man Who Came Back'" by Robert Silverberg.
Robert Silverberg has been a prolific writer for over 50 years. During the 1950s and 1960s he often used a "pen" name for the stories he sold to SF magazines and book publishers, names like; Calvin M. Knox, David Osborne, Ivar Jorgenson, and who knows how many others.
As a buyer and a reader of SF magazines and books for over 50 years I have had to put up with phony author's names for stories that often appeared on the contents pages. Even the editors created phony "house" names for some of the authors they published. When I purchased an issue of "Amazing Stories" in the early 1950s, the contents page usually listed stories by authors like; "Robert Arnette," "Alexander Blade," "E.K. Jarvis," "Warren Kastel," and others that were all phony names. So who wrote those damned stories?
The use of a phony name, otherwise known as a "Pen," or "pseudonym," or "house" name, has always been a common practice in the publishing field. As you probably know, "Mark Twain" was actually Samuel Clemens, "A.A. Fair" was Erle Stanley Gardner, "Max Brand" was Frederick Faust . . . But no one really seems to care about the widespread use of phony names, it's accepted as a harmless practice.
But it has always been annoying to me, over time I learned that the stories I read by "Lewis Padgett" were actually written by Henry Kuttner, that "Anson MacDonald" was really Robert Heinlein, that "Will Stewart" was Jack Williamson, and on, and on, and on . . . I've read and heard all the reasons why writers and editors use pen names, but I'm not convinced that all that deception is really necessary. Do you?
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