Pen Names or Nom De Plume: Why people are using it?

 

                          What is a pen name? 

                                                                                                                       A pen name, nom de plume, or literary double, is a pseudonym adopted by an author. A pen name may be used to make the author's name more distinctive, to disguise his or her gender, to distance an author from some or all of his or her other works, to protect the author from retribution for his or her writings, to combine more than one author into a single author, or for any of a number of reasons related to the marketing or aesthetic presentation of the work. The author's real name may be known to only the publisher, or may come to be common

 knowledge.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pen_name

                                                                  

                                 What is in a Name? 

                                  A rose by any other name might smell sweet, but many authors choose to take on a nom de plume for a variety of reasons. Historically, some women wrote under men's names so that their work would be taken more seriously - especially in nineteenth century, when Nathaniel Hawthorne complained about a "damned mob of scribbling women" whose novels were so popular. Mary Ann Evans, the author of Middlemarch who is better known as George Eliot, was one such novelist. Other authors published under pseudonyms to keep their professions or writing genres separate; this was the case for the mathematician Charles Dodgson, who wrote  Alice's Adventures in Wonderland as Lewis Carroll. Edward Gorey, known for his darkly illustrated books, took dozens of pseudonyms, most of them scrambled versions of his name - like Ogdred Weary, Dogear Wryde. and E. G Deadworry.

You can see this in the book entitled " Don't know much about literature" By Kenneth G. Davis and Jenny Davis

                                                                          

Using a pen name for me is a work of art because it shows how smart are the writers. They use pen names for the readers to read their writings. Writers use pen names not to degrade other people that is how unique pen names are. This seems to satisfy most people, and, for a long time, I actually believed it myself. the truth is, I have been fascinated by the notion of pseudonyms from the moment I became aware of the existence of   pen names.