What's in a (Pen) Name? (Feat. Princess Weekes) | It's Lit
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To some people, the idea of a pen name seems kind of weird. If I, a writer, am going to put countless hours of hard work and thought into my masterpiece, why wouldn’t I want to put my own name underneath the title?
But from Stephen King to Ben Franklin to …., who had their own secret aliases, to Mark Twain and Dr. Seuss, whose pseudonyms became so famous that they are remembered by their pen names and not their actual names, the nom de plume has a long and proud history in the literary world.
Hosted by Lindsay Ellis and Princess Weekes, It’s Lit! is a show about our favorite books, genres, and why we love to read. It’s Lit has been made possible in part by the National Endowment for the Humanities: Exploring the human endeavor.
Interested in using this video as a teaching resource? Check it out on PBS LearningMedia: to.pbs.org/3fRHLNL
Hosted by: Princess Weekes
Written by: Angelina Meehan
Director: David Schulte
Executive Producer: Amanda Fox
Producer: Stephanie Noone
Editors: Nicole Kopren
Writing Consultants: Maia Krause
Assistant Director of Programming (PBS): Gabrielle Ewing
Executives in Charge (PBS): Brandon Arolfo, Adam Dylewski
Produced by Spotzen for PBS Digital Studios.
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I'm gonna go ahead and take the topic of this video as an excuse to talk a little about pen names in (classical) Persian literature, where pen names were not just common, but used pretty much without exception by everyone (and the same goes for Ottoman and Mughal Indian literature, which followed the same literary tradition). The purpose of pen names wasn't anonymity or trying to differentiate between an author and their public persona (in fact the opposite was very much true). Pen names had a much more practical purpose. You see, literature, and poetry in particular was a highly esteemed craft in the Persian world and a talented poet could actually use their skills to get appointed to high positions in the court of a king or attract a wealthy patron to give them money for their work. This in turn meant that there was a lot of rivalry between poets and some of the more sneaky poets would try to steal a line or two or even an entire poem from a different poet and present it as their own in the hopes of gaining status and favours from a patron.
This is where the pen names come in, they were a form of copyright protection! In the most common form of poetry (the Ghazel, a love poem usually between 5 - 15 lines long) poets would always insert their pen name in the very last line, letting everyone know who wrote it. Persian poetry was written according to very strict rules of rhyme and metre, meaning that taking the name out or changing it would be instantly noticeable (and someone skilled enough to change it without ruining the poem probably wouldn't have any trouble writing their own work), meaning they could rest assured knowing nobody could try to steal it!
wow, that's really interesting! thank you!
wow that's brilliant. what a clever way to protect your work!
Fascinating, thank you for sharing!
That's neat to know, thanks! Trying to come up with rhymes to my own name right now, for if I ever get into doing poetry.
Wow!
Interestingly Philip Defranco was originally a nom de plume too(his real name was Philip James Franchini) but he legally changed it for business reasons after he became more known by it.
came to say this.
@@bentn13 also came to say this
Came to say this but saw you did it way better. I like your writing.
Was gonna mention this. Also it's so wild to me that there's someone out there who picked a fake name for youtube as a teenager, but ended up so well known by it that not only did he change his name legally, but his wife and children have that last name as well
I'm surprised George Elliot wasnt mentioned as she is much more well known by her pen name than her name Mary Ann Evans
I couldn't stop thinking of her as I watched! :) I think she, like the Bronte sisters, chose her pen name, because she knew people wouldn't take her work seriously if they knew a woman wrote it.
I just love Princess. She's an amazing host!
She's great, and has really come into her own! She give me Amber Ruffin vibes
@@davidshi451 They are nothing alike aside from race. You can compliment Black women
Without comparing us to others..
I think Silence Dogood is my favorite example of a pen name. It's just so... pen-name-y
Totally forgot that it was a real pen name used, I was straight up thinking they’d talk about National Treasure and the role that plot point played. Then the host started talking and I was like oh damn that was an actual Ben Franklin thing... oof lol
The “Pen name/Drag name” Venn diagram is just a circle
Careful girls, if you two bring up "Hype House Blood Bath" to many times we're gonna start demanding you actually write it.
The welcome return of Hype House Blood Bath 🥰
I, too, hope this becomes a running theme in Weekes's videos.
I want this book.
She had me at Pocky influencer.
Lies, everyone knows that Lemony Snicket is the author of SoUE and Handler is just his associate.
And it's like the people who thinks that Sherlock Holmes and John H. Watson are real people and Arthur Conan Doyle is their literary agent.
@@Gemmabeta But they were and he was
completely unrelated but Princess' hair looks so good
This video gets a thumbs up for the Kirishima shirt alone.
@Scumfuck McDoucheface It's a tertiary character from a current popular manga/anime "My Hero Academia".
I thought for sure you would mention that Stephen King's son chose the pen name Joe Hill to not have to be compared to his famous father when he first stated to be published.
a pretty loaded pen name, tho!
He must be joking! Joe...king!
@@saffodils He was named Joseph Hillstrom King after the famous songwirter and labor rights' activist who was better known under the name Joe Hill (born Hägglund). So it was a pretty obvious alias once revealed.
@@bookshelfhoney *groan*
@@MariaVosa I hadnt realized that he was actually named after joe hill too! cool!
I love how Princess Weekes says "nom de plume", its very charming
You gotta love Portuguese autor Fernando Pessoa, he was so prolific and his writing so diverse, he had 4 different pen names for each of the styles of writing he did. And each of his pen names has a completely distinct personality.
he was portuguese
Oh it's true, I guess I mixed up.
@@Laribhaven it's easy to mix up, happened to me too
I agree. Actually, something like 80 of them.
thank you for this new installment of the Squibbles Cinematic Universe
i found a book signed by daniel handler at the thrift store and i was so excited i showed everyone and inevitably they mentioned, "but the author is lemony snicket???" like two real life people on this plane of existence named their son lemony
Awesome find!
Very relatable 😂
In my first experience in knowing Lemony's works (after I read ASOUE) I always get confused of this. Like, DANIEL HANDLER? WHO??
I find it funny that they used philip defranco as example a real name when it’s originally not
Well I was going to leave that comment...
No need now.
I’m so excited for the return of Hype House Blood Bath and Jimmy Squibbles
I originally started using pen names because I wrote LGBTQ+ romances but still had aspirations to become a teacher. Then I studied in the UK for my BA and realised that not only is my name super uncommon in the Netherlands, it's nigh on impossible to pronounce properly for English speakers. Since I write and publish in English, I've stuck with pen names since. These days, I have multiple pen names because I write in varying genres, some of which aren't that open to reading the other genres I write in. I'm open about all of these pen names belonging to me (because keeping them all separate was waaaaaay too much of a headache, especially since I just didn't have the energy for it), but each pen name is 1. easy to pronounce in English and 2. a different 'flavour' of story. It also helps me distinguish between my own author voices when I work on the different pen names.
Sounds like what I heard from Alexa Dunne and Jenna Moreci when giving advice on using/creating a pen name. Hopefully you've done well enough to make each "voice" different enough to not have the same problem King had before he "killed off" his Richard Bachman persona; being seen as "too similar" to his own writing style
@@andrewmalinowski6673 I don't know if they're super different, but even when I tell people that all the names on my publisher website are all my pen names, that it's all me, people sometimes still take months or years to realise that it really is all me. I don't see a massive difference between the pen names and I can easily recognise it's all me, but of course, I see it differently than readers do. The main reason I split them off is because I started with an MM romance pen name, then started writing MF romance (though that pen name is mostly queer reverse harem these days), and loads of MM readers (especially 5-6 years ago) would see authors who write both MM and MF as 'fake' or would blacklist or stop reading those authors. Which is why I originally split off the MF work from the MM work. Then I started a YA pen name, since the other two were very steamy, and that pen name started with a nerdy FF YA romance, which, again, very little overlap with the other two, and since it was YA, I didn't want the younger readers to accidentally find my adult stuff. These days, I have a couple of 'sub' pen names, which are very similar pen names to the original pen name, and are heavily cross-promoted, but are different from the original pen name, my YA pen name has one 'sub' pen name which writes low-heat (not no-heat, just low-heat) adult FF romances and one 'sub' pen name which does queer YA scifi (split off because the original audience for that kind of work looks down on romance authors, but I didn't want to fully split it off) and my MF pen name was only contemporary stuff, so I've made a 'sub' pen name there which does PNR stuff (and the 'sub' pen name is much more popular than the original pen name these days...).
So, yeah, I run 3 'main' pen names, with also 3 'sub' pen names, but I've stopped trying to keep them all separate. These days, it's simply to easily be able to point people towards a certain pen name and know that no matter the book from that pen name that they pick up, they get the experience they're looking for.
@@EasilyDistractedPlanner Oh my god, do you have an assistant or editor who helps you keep track? Just reading that made my head spin, lol!
@@NWednesdayQuansah LOL. No keeping track needed. I don't usually write on all the pen names at the same time, I tend to focus on one and then another for long stretches of time. So when I'm working, I don't have to swap very often. ;)
oh my god i love her energy?? she could talk about anything and i would be entertained
She has her own channel too! You can look up Melina Pendulum on TH-cam 😊
@@EilleenCarrion it took me entirely too long to realize that!
A favorite pen name of mine is Nathaniel Hawthorne. His real last name was Hathorne, and one of his ancestors was John Hathorne, a judge in the Salem Witch trials. Thus Nathaniel changed his last name to Hawthorne to distance himself. Can't say I blame him.
Ben Kenobi VS Obi Wan Kenobi
Hawthorne VS Hathorne
Multiple authors writing under one name is one of my favorite examples, like Publius, of course, or "Expanse" author James SA Corey (Ty Franck and Daniel Abraham) or ongoing series like "Nancy Drew" author Caroline Keene (which has been about thirty different ghost writers over the years).
This makes me think of something mentioned about Animorphs, both KA Applegate and her husband ghostwrote for the Sweet Valley High series
Enid Blyton is a curious case. She wrote six books of the St. Clare's series. Not only did the translator take massive liberties with the German translation, they basically rewrote the whole thing. The German series comprises of 39 books, all of them published under the name Enid Blyton, but I have no idea who actually wrote them.
I can’t believe authoress is a real word, shoutout to Maya from Girlfriends...
I'm a little surprised George Eliot didn't get covered. Oh well sometimes there is not enough time.
Speaking of Princess's shirt, a lot of manga authors use pen names too, probably the most famous at the moment being "One" who drew One-Punch Man and Mob Psycho 100
9:55 "I'll write under a pseudonym, you'll see what I can do to him"
I'm so happy Jimmy Squibbles is a reoccurring gag
fujiko fujio (doraemon writers) is two guys forming a writing team and writing under a single name, and they stopped using this name after they split. pen name is used like a music band name.
I'm always amazed at the reverence the US founders had for the Roman Republic, a society whose defining feature was a collapse into authoritarianism and a later total societal collapse.
this seems like foreshadowing
Let's not forget their penchant for absorbing other territories they conquered into their hegemony, making slaves of free peoples, and making spectacles of violent sports. I'm referring to the Romans, but you'll be forgiven if you thought I was referring to the US.
All right, but apart from the sanitation, medicine, education, wine, public order, irrigation, roads, the fresh water system and public health, what have the Romans ever done for us?
Yeah, but it took almost 500 years for the first part and another 500 for the second. Most societies are lucky if they get two centuries!
@@skryabin07 everything you listed has existed before and without Rome. They can have the fasces, dood. Get over it
I’m so glad that you’re back Princess!!!
You could talk also about the case of the Portuguese writer Fernando Pessoa (who created multiple pseudonyms, each with its own personality).
Great video! Thank you for this and greetings from Mexico City!
Let's not forget Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa, who had not one but many pen names (heteronyms), each one with a distinct style and its own biography. The most notable ones were: Álvaro de Campos, Ricardo Reis, Alberto Caeiro and Bernardo Soares. One of his poems puts front and center the ambiguity between what is real and what is not for the author: "The poet is a faker / who's so good at its act / he even fakes the pain / of pain he feels in fact"
"Cancer of the pseudonym" lol
Enjoyable vid as always. This channel is so consistently good.
I think _Carmela Ciuraru_ might be the most awesome, not made up name, ever...
Is she a Bond villian? A Pokemon? A superhero? *EVERY INFLECTION IS DIFFERENT AND AMAZING.*
The first shot of this video instantly had me captured.
It's interesting seeing the history of "other names". As a trans person, I have held more names than I have fingers. Some are true, some are dead, some are living, and some are a paintbrush. Every person I have met has at least two names, though often they have more than they know. Many have the "name as family" and the "name as associate". Most also have the "name as friend". Some have many "names as friend". A few have multiple "names as family". And then there are the less known "names as self". Names as self are things like heart's name or spirit name, or the names you use for the different parts of your mind. A name is simply the word you use to denote an entity, and we all contain multitudes.
Second episode of this, working backwards, and I'm loving everything about this woman! I could watch her talk about anything. Love this passion.
Funny as Philip DeFranco wasn't his real name he changed it after going by it on TH-cam for years.
I've always wondered this, thanks Princess!
I don't have any memory of subscribing to this channel but I'm so glad I did. Great work drunk me!
A famous author here in Denmark writes as Helle Helle - a combination of her own first name and her great grandmother's last name, which are of course the same. Helle is a very common name, so I always thought of her pen name as a sort of "normcore" joke
Nice to see la continuity effort between this and the previous video about bestsellers.
Great vid @Storied! Keep it up!
I am sarcastically perturbed that bell hooks is wholly capitalised.
Princess Weekes is my new fav person. Love her delivery of the subject.
Princess! I've paused the video at 3:32 just to come here and thank you for your perfect comment about Heart of Darkness! I have not met anyone else who hates this book as much as I do - and I had to read it several times for several different classes...
Heart of Darkness does include a reference to Huntley and Palmer's, a biscuit manufacturer in my hometown of Reading, England (but no explicit reference to Africa, Belgium, the Congo...)
This is kind of random but I've been thinking a lot lately about how fantasy authors come up with names for their fictional countries. They're usually similar to real nations or cultures that it's based on so the audience can properly understand the metaphor (Nikan from The Poppy War and all of Guy Gavriel Kay's works come to mind). Would love to see a video on that!
Love this channel, I love Princess' break down of pen names. That said, that isn't George Sand wearing men's clothes, it's Colette, who sort of used a pen name in that she gave up her first and middle name.
thanks!! Very interesting episode!
Very informative episode, good stuff! - another example point you could have been Stan Lee - he was born Stanley Martin Lieber, and wanted to write novels, but he enjoyed working with comics, but this was the 1940s and comic books were considered a low-brow literary genre, so he decided that while working in comics, he would sign them as "Stan Lee", while Lieber would be his novelist name. And eventually that became the name he stuck with professionally
Another fun video! Thanks!
A lot of political satirists and authors and even journalists use pen names in my country to avoid getting killed, jailed, tortured, or just ostracized in someway.
George Elliot and Lewis Carroll are also authors who used non de plumes
”Heart of Darkness terrible book” yes! Fully agreed!
The pen name also allows some flexibility on the "death of the author" concept. There is a disturbing number of people judging an author's personality based on the reader's personal interpretation of the author's work (or at least their understanding of an opinion piece based on someone else's reading of the author's work because reading properly is hard and judging unfairly on Twitter isn't).
Thanks for sharing!
Dear Science, I hate the word "simp". Great video, though. I adore this series :-)
Nice one!
Also, I love the word "melange".
Love this!
I like how you started off the video 'vogueing'! 😁
I knew from the start I wanted my Science Fiction work to be under a pen name for several reasons: 1) self-esteem issue making me think my work wasn't good enough made writing under a pen name safe, and hidden. 2)-as a black author, I didn't want to get pigeon-holed into what people thought my book was about, so they could read it without the influence of seeing me. 3)-I wanted a bit more freedom to share some of my darker thoughts on the page through my characters and plots and didn't want to be judged by people who knew me.
I had this whole persona for my SF, with future plans to dress in disguise or hide my identity if/when I had a book signing or podcast interview.
I only recently shared my SF pen name in a Facebook post. I don't get much traffic there, so I doubt anyone will see it, but it's there if someone looks for it.
My current pen name is more for a sense of separating the business side of publishing from myself. Remember when the artist formerly known as Prince went around known only as a symbol for a while? O(+>, well my paranoid mind fears not being able to use my government name as I wish after my writing career takes off. I know, crazy thinking. Well, that's why I chose to be a writer. A nom de plume writer at that.
Aaaaahhhhhh we're shirt twins!! Kirishima needs more love 💘
I love Princess' enthusiasm and humour. 😍
James Alfred Wight had a terrible time finding a pen name in order to avoid violating a Royal College of Veterinary Surgeons' regulation which prevented vets from any type of advertising. Every time he'd invent one, he'd find it was already the name of an actual veterinarian (the book of vet listings was huge). He finally found a name he liked one afternoon while watching a football match, and after confirming the Birmingham City goalie's name was not also the name of an existing veterinarian, took the pen name of James Herriot for his book series: "All Creatures Great and Small".
One of my favourite metatextual examples of penames is Kurt Vonnegut's Kilgore Trout whom is a fictional version of real author Theo Sturgeon
When Princess said that Stephen King also wrote under the pen name Richard Bachman, I did a doulble-take, "Wait, what?? Stephen King wrote "Jonathan Livingston Seagull??? .... oh, wait. That was Richard BACH." lol
Also not to be confused with the guitarist from Bachman-Turner Overdrive.
Wow I was never so early! Hiiiii Princess
glad to see hype house blood bath back. Real classic
Great video!!!
Great video. Great job Princess
Amazing!
If I ever got published, my favourite nom de plume would be "Zachariah Peardrops" (because I do not interact much with the human race, I would not be able to write much of interest, although I do have some knowledge of things like boggers, anvils, toots, ninis, noonoos, tuts, wasptrasts (sic), genoos, hamburgers of death and so forth). Thank you always for this very informative tutorial on literary matters - and yes, I did recently discover the "Other Words" channel.
Lmao for some reason, I want that swimming Stephen King-headed shark to be the screensaver on my computer.
Around the same time this came out I did a deep dive on the Bronte sisters and their lives and writing.
Love your Red Riot t-shirt
very interesting video! well done
1:03 : Even her real name is partly a pen name.
I can't believe you left out the Theodore geisel came up with his pen name while trying to avoid debt collectors.
Reminds me of that episode of 30 Rock when Tracy yelled at Dot Com that he should read more women writers and Dot Com goes, “ but Tracy, George Elliot was a woman.”
YOUR SHIRT, lady, I came here for the pen name but I stayed for Kiri.
Would you mind elaborating on why Heart of Darkness is so, off the cuff, referred to as a "terrible book"? As if that was common knowledge, because as far as I have heard (in Europe) it's very highly regarded because of how critical it is towards colonization etc. (from my perspective) Thanks!
Terrible is a confusing word. It can mean great or awful.
Its often criticized for having a very "noble savage" depiction of Africa and for only showing a European view on colonization, but I've never heard anyone call it terrible
@@bluexephosfan970 Yes this criticism seems very valid, the novel is of course coloured by its time period like all others. Hard to expect it to be a post colonial masterpiece 100 years early! Thank you for your response!
Chinua Achebe wrote a critique about it. Might wanna check it out.
@@grace_1139 Thank you for this recommendation, I will look it up!
I understand that the formatting was that her name is all caps but I was a bit miffed that bell hooks name was capitalized.
I don't have an opinion on this, justa like the content 🙌🏻 keep up the good work 💜
I know firsthand the draw of pseudonyms. Dad was a macho bigot; I was adopted, bookish, & had a "neuter" version of his gram's name. Not fun times. In my 20s, found out of my Irish roots & the tenuous ties between their folklore and the Greeks'; tying a namesake saint to a similar-sounding teacher of heroes helped my self-image a lot. These days I think of myself more as the cross "Khyran" then Kerry.
I love your shirt 🧡
Jimmy Squibbles is a running joke now. I'm all for that.
Charles Dickens humorous novel Sketches by Boz was orignally published under the alias Boz
Eric Blair worked for the BBC under that name, so his writing was as George Orwell.
Slightly bummed that Søren kierkegaard, aka Johannes DeCastillio, and Climactus, wasn't mentioned but the video very well made
Gotta love Twain.
Ann Rice used the pen name Charlotte Rampling for her S&M themed romance novels.
Why isn't Princess Weekes teaches world lit?! So informative while being fun.
Absolutely no errors here
I absolutely love pirateaba and their free serial "The Wandering Inn." I almost don't want to know who they are!
In my case I went with Kent J. Starrett because it sounded like the name of a classic horror author like Chuck Beaumont or Harlan Ellison. My real name is Gary, and Gary is the name of the creepy janitor in a horror novel; not the guy who writes one.
PUBLISHER: How big is your pen name?
AUTHOR: Big enough for my hand to hold.
Bless you for calling out Heart of Darkness as a terrible book. I said that to my 10th grade English teacher and that woman went out of her way to try to fail me on everything else I did in that class until the principal forced her to have another teacher verify the grades when my parents and I started complaining.
Also, it's bell hooks, not Bell Hooks, in order to shift attention from her identity to her ideas.
loved the video, but i really wish the subtitles weren't missing stuff
I use a pen name when I write posts. That way if I piss someone off, they can't SWAT me or anything.
I used the pen name Buzzy Fly for the same reason. It didn't work.
Kurt Vonnegut used a pen name for his character/alter ego in Breakfast of Champions, as an ironic statement about his own struggles as an author.P.S.: Love your commentary and insights.
love the Kirishima shirt! he's one of my favorites!!
Was just about to comment this!! A cutie!!