I wonder if it is possible today to publish under a pseudonym that will stand the test of history, given what we know about mass surveillance databases.
No need to even go there. Elena Ferrante got made a few years ago simply by tracking royalties payments. Most lit pseudonyms are broken by simple gossip.
I think the thing that makes it so truly rare, even in history is that very few people can resist getting even some recognition for their work. At the very least, most authors have a handful of literary minded friends they discuss their ideas and the machanical aspects of their writing with.
It's just incredibly hard for most people to never breathe a word of something that eats up so much of their mind like writing a book does. Especially when that work begins to recieve acclaim.
Writing has this in common with crime actually. A stunning number of people are made for a crime because they talk about it. Even to the point of many eventual exhiberstions coming when a perpetrator discusses the crime years later, believing themselves out of the woods.
I'm not sure Ferrante is an example of someone trying genuinely to remain anonymous.
The publisher continues to deny but it’s an open secret by now that she’s Anita Raja. The only question is the degree of involvement from her husband Domenico Starnone (also a writer), since his style is very close to her style; but Raja has also been a long-time editor for Starnone, so the overlapping might be entirely organic.
A lot of publishing houses, even large ones, won't let you use a pseudonym since they lean heavily on the author generating their own buzz and publicity for the book.
It will be interesting in the future to find out if the intelligence agencies know who created Bitcoin. Can anyone think of other modern mysteries that government surveillance might know the answer to but are keeping quiet?
