Why a pseudonym? Why not his real name?
He wanted to write everything there was when he was beginning. In the first place, he said he wanted to save his real name for his history of South Carolina. Then his Vietnam novel.
In youth he loved Louis L’Amour’s Westerns. He bought a new Louis L’Amour book one time and when he read it, it wasn’t a Western, it was a mystery! So, he thought he’d have a name for every genre to keep this from happening to his fans. “Robert Jordan” had nothing to do with For Whom the Bell Tolls .
Reference to a post from a Dragonmounter: The post was from a woman who started reading the series 12 years ago. She had small children, not enough money for drugs or alcohol. A friend gave her The Eye of the World . And it worked! Now her son is reading them and when he picked up The Gathering Storm answered the question of why he didn’t use his own name: “Why of course he did! He’s a superhero! You don’t think Batman’s real name is Batman, do you?”
If you are viewing this on github.io, you can see that this site is open source. Please do not try to improve this page. It is auto-generated by a python script. If you have suggestions for improvements, please start a discussion on the github repo or the Discord.