The theme this week was authors who used pseudonyms, or pen names. Their literary counterparts sometimes generated controversy or confusion.
1. Our first author has had several pseudonyms to help separate her adult level books from her young adult books, and also from her books for younger children. One of her favorite young adult characters is John Fell, a teen who solves mysteries. One of the mysteries involves changing places with a prep school student. Another involves ventriloquism. Any idea who the author is, or what any of her pseudonyms are?
Liviania recognized our first author by her pseudonym M.E. Kerr. The author’s real name is Marijane Meeker, who has also written under the names Ann Aldrich and Vin Packer for adults, and Mary James for younger children. The use of pseudonyms in this case allows readers to find the author’s books by genre.
2. This author made up a biography to go with his pseudonym, which backfired when the the books she supposedly wrote became popular. He had included some made up titles in the biography and people actually began searching for them. He thought the name he chose was an obvious pseudonym: “Sue Denim.” Do you know who this less-than-serious author might be?
Dav Pilkey used the pen name Sue Denim for his Dumb Bunnies series. His false biography of Sue Denim doesn’t seem like it would fool people into looking for her other titles, but it did according to his confession biography of Sue Denim. Newer editions of the books list Dav as the author.
It is easy to see why the Dumb Bunnies books might generate strong emotions, both pro and con, and why the author might have chosen to use a pseudonym, at least initially.
Dav Pilkey is best known for his Captain Underpants stories.
——————————————————————————————————————————– If you are in the mood to play more Children’s Author Trivia, simply click on the icon below for a list of previous questions (or you can click on the “Children’s Author Trivia Questions” category in the left sidebar). Enjoy!
