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    Nom de Plume: A (Secret) History of Pseudonyms
    Unavailable
    Nom de Plume: A (Secret) History of Pseudonyms
    Unavailable
    Nom de Plume: A (Secret) History of Pseudonyms
    Ebook407 pages6 hours

    Nom de Plume: A (Secret) History of Pseudonyms

    By Carmela Ciuraru

    4/5

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    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this ebook

    What's in a name?

    In our "look at me" era, everyone's a brand. Privacy now seems a quaint relic, and self-effacement is a thing of the past. Yet, as Nom de Plume reminds us, this was not always the case. Exploring the fascinating stories of more than a dozen authorial impostors across several centuries and cultures, Carmela Ciuraru plumbs the creative process and the darker, often crippling aspects of fame.

    Biographies have chronicled the lives of pseudonymous authors such as Mark Twain, Isak Dinesen, and George Eliot, but never before have the stories behind many noms de plume been collected into a single volume. These are narratives of secrecy, obsession, modesty, scandal, defiance, and shame: Only through the protective guise of Lewis Carroll could a shy, half-deaf Victorian mathematician at Oxford feel free to let his imagination run wild. The "three weird sisters" (as they were called by the poet Ted Hughes) from Yorkshire—the Brontes—produced instant bestsellers that transformed them into literary icons, yet they wrote under the cloak of male authorship. Bored by her aristocratic milieu, a cigar-smoking, cross-dressing baroness rejected the rules of propriety by having sexual liaisons with men and women alike, publishing novels and plays under the name George Sand.

    Grounded by research yet highly accessible and engaging, these provocative, astonishing stories reveal the complex motives of writers who harbored secret identities—sometimes playfully, sometimes with terrible anguish and tragic consequences. A wide-ranging examination of pseudonyms both familiar and obscure, Nom de Plume is part detective story, part exposé, part literary history, and an absorbing psychological meditation on identity and creativity.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHarperCollins
    Release dateJun 14, 2011
    ISBN9780062109569
    Unavailable
    Nom de Plume: A (Secret) History of Pseudonyms
    Author

    Carmela Ciuraru

    Carmela Ciuraru is the author of Nom de Plume: A (Secret) History of Pseudonyms, and her anthologies include First Loves: Poets Introduce the Essential Poems That Captivated and Inspired Them and Solitude Poems. She is a member of PEN American and the National Book Critics Circle, and she has been interviewed on The Today Show and by newspapers and radio stations internationally. She lives in New York City.

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    Reviews for Nom de Plume

    4/5

    26 ratings4 reviews

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    • 4/5
      Nice little mini-biographies of a dozen or so writers that used pen-names, some of whom were real oddballs.
    • 4/5
      I greatly enjoyed this. Some of the authors profiled were unfamiliar to me, but now I feel compelled to pick up works by all of them. Some lived tragic lives, others quiet ones, but all were written about compellingly. Definitely recommended.
    • 4/5
      Another one from my Read Your Library series. This is one I'd tried to read before, but let time get away from me and had to return to the library before I could read it. This time, I was determined to get to it, and I'm glad I did.Nom de Plume explores the various reasons authors assume a pseudonym when writing a book; whether it be for privacy, anonymity, or to protect family or friends from scrutiny, the reasons don't matter so much as the stories these authors tell, and in the case of this book, the stories of these particular authors' lives.Definitely a look at the true lives behind some very famous names, and most of them only leave you wanting to learn more about these authors and the lives they led outside their fiction.
    • 4/5
      What’s in a name? There are many reasons to write under an assumed one: striving for equality; a morbid fear of publicity; a sordid past; the love of masquerade; an affluent upbringing; and perhaps even multiple-personality syndrome.Carmela Ciuraru’s Nom de Plume is a wonderful collection of brief biographies that focus on writers who are known to us today under an assumed name (or were so known when they published — Charlotte Bronte and her sisters published as the Bell brothers – Acton, Currer and Ellis.) There is no single reason why an author assumes a fictional identity — sometimes playfully — more often due to tragic heart-breaking necessity. Ciuraru’s meditation on identity and masquerade is an illuminating read.