Not quite a pen name...

July 12, 2019 7:02 AM

Plenty of famous writers have dropped their first name and gone by their middle name (e.g. Adeline Virginia Woolf). Have any famous writers dropped their surname and just gone by some combo of their given names?

The reason I ask is that I'm looking for inspiration. I'll be trying to publish a novel in the next year, but I've never liked my surname. However, my three names are all interchangeable as first and last names, and there is one rearrangement that strikes me as more aesthetically appealing – e.g., going from something like "Thomas James Craig" to "James Thomas."

Has this ever been done by a writer of note? I'm iffy about the idea and looking for precedents.

posted by Beardman to Media & Arts (15 answers total)

The writer Nevil Shute Norway dropped his last name to become Nevil Shute.
posted by all the light we cannot see at 7:09 AM on July 12, 2019 [3 favorites]

Joseph Conrad, kinda (he also Anglicized it). His birth name is Józef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski.
posted by box at 7:14 AM on July 12, 2019 [2 favorites]

Not an author but Diahann Carol's given name was Carol Diahann Johnson. Actors change and rearrange names all the time, I say go for it!
posted by Threeve at 7:37 AM on July 12, 2019

Dr. Seuss was born Theodor Seuss Geisel.
posted by FencingGal at 7:40 AM on July 12, 2019 [1 favorite]

Stephen King's son, Joe Hill.
posted by Occula at 7:56 AM on July 12, 2019

Eli Clare, who is not super-famous but who is the respected author of Exile & Pride, and recently Brilliant Imperfection: Grappling with Cure from Duke University Press, is an example. Clare was his middle name, which he made his legal last name as a young adult in order to drop the last name of an abusive parent.
posted by Orlop at 8:44 AM on July 12, 2019

Romain de Tirtoff, the Russian-born artist known as Erté, worked primarily in France. His initials RT pronounced with a French accent become Erté (AirTay). One of the more fun explanations of a pseudonym.
posted by twentyfeetof tacos at 8:58 AM on July 12, 2019

Via this Wikipedia page:
John Anthony Burgess Wilson, pen name Anthony Burgess
Edward Charles Edmond Hemsted, pen name Edward Charles
Johann Paul Friedrich Richter, pen name Jean Paul
Piers Anthony Dillingham Jacob, pen name Piers Anthony
Robert Garioch Sutherland, pen name Robert Garioch
posted by beagle at 9:28 AM on July 12, 2019

Elizabeth Bear is the first one who leapt to mind.
posted by restless_nomad at 9:40 AM on July 12, 2019

Ford Maddox Ford took his first name and used it as his last. His real name was Ford Hermann Hueffer, and he was related to the pre-Raphaelite painter Ford Maddox Brown.
posted by ubiquity at 11:44 AM on July 12, 2019 [1 favorite]

Lewis Carroll's real name was Charles Lutwidge Dodgson -- his pen-name was a Anglicized version of his first and middle names reversed.
posted by ubiquity at 11:50 AM on July 12, 2019

Not a literary author as such, but Fiona Apple's full name is Fiona Apple McAfee-Maggart.
posted by wreckingball at 11:53 AM on July 12, 2019

Anatole France was actually François-Anatole Thibault.
posted by ubiquity at 11:58 AM on July 12, 2019

John Wyndham was actually John Wyndham Parkes Lucas Beynon Harris.
posted by ubiquity at 12:06 PM on July 12, 2019

"My birth certificate says 'Eugene Louis Vidal': this was changed to Eugene Luther Vidal Jr.; then Gore was added at my christening [in 1939]; then, at fourteen, I got rid of the first two names."

Gore Vidal in Palimpsest (1995), p. 401
posted by Short Attention Sp at 5:53 AM on July 13, 2019