Curated playlist
19th-century pseudonymous writers
- Charles DickensCharles Dickens earned six shillings a week pasting labels onto pots of boot blacking in a tumble-down warehouse overrun with rats. He was twelve years old, and his father had just been locked inside the Marshalsea debtors' prison in…
- Mark TwainMark Twain was born on the 30th of November 1835, shortly after Halley's Comet swept past the Earth, and he came to believe the two of them were bound together. In 1909 he wrote it plainly. "I came in with Halley's Comet in 1835. It is…
- Edgar Allan PoeEdgar Allan Poe was found semiconscious on the streets of Baltimore on the 3rd of October, 1849, wearing clothes that were not his own. He could not explain himself. Four days later, at five in the morning on a Sunday, he was dead. He was…
- Lewis CarrollCharles Lutwidge Dodgson was born on the 27th of January 1832 at All Saints' Vicarage in Daresbury, Cheshire, the third oldest of 11 children, and the world would come to know him by a name he invented for himself: Lewis Carroll. That name…
- Robert Louis StevensonRobert Louis Stevenson was born at 8 Howard Place in Edinburgh on the 13th of November 1850, into a dynasty of lighthouse engineers, and died at the age of 44 on a tropical island at the far end of the Pacific. Between those two points…
- George EliotGeorge Eliot was the pen name of a woman who lived openly with a man who was married to someone else. From 1854 to 1878 Mary Ann Evans shared a home with George Henry Lewes, called him her husband, and weathered the disapproval that…
- Vladimir LeninVladimir Ilyich Ulyanov, the man the world would come to know as Vladimir Lenin, took the name from no person at all. He first used it in December 1901, and one theory ties it to the Siberian Lena River. He often wrote it as N. Lenin,…
- StendhalStendhal collapsed on a Paris street on the 23rd of March 1842 and died a few hours later. He had spent decades writing under false names, hiding behind more than a hundred pseudonyms, signing letters as "William Crocodile" or "Don Phlegm"…
- Maxim GorkyMaxim Gorky was born Alexei Maximovich Peshkov in Nizhny Novgorod, and by the time he died in June 1936, his ashes were carried through Moscow by Joseph Stalin himself. Between those two facts lies a life of extraordinary contradiction: a…
- Nikolai LeskovNikolai Semyonovich Leskov died on the 5th of March 1895, and his funeral was held in silence. He had written the instruction into his will in December 1892: no speeches over his body. "I know I have many bad things in me and do not…