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You've been there; you do all the work and someone else
takes all the credit.
Believe it or not, there are folks
out there who are more than happy for that to happen. We refer to the ghostwriter, whose anonymous
work we celebrate this week.
We're not talking about Stephen King
or Dean Koontz, who
write stories about ghosts;
we mean writers who turn out stories for other people, who then put their own
names on the work.
While the practice is far from a recent invention (there are well-meaning -- if stupid --
folks who think that William Shakespeare ghosted for the Earl of Oxford
or Christopher Marlowe despite both of them being dead before some of Shakespeare's plays were written), it's most common in genre fiction and biography (where
the words "with" or "as told to" are the giveaways).
During the McCarthy
era of the 1950s, numerous scripts were written by blacklisted writers, but credited to "fronts."
There are "house names,"
too. Such writers as Carolyn Keene, Franklin W. Dixon, Maxwell Grant, and Kenneth Robeson never existed, but were used by publishers
to give characters a brand identity. Even "Ellery Queen" was initially a pen name for the team of Manfred Bennington Lee and Frederic Dannay (whose name was, in itself, a pseudonym for Daniel Nathan).
And then there's the case of Bob Kane. The nominal
"creator"
of Batman was notorious for almost never writing or drawing the Caped
Crusader, but for farming out the work to more talented individuals like Bill Finger,
Jerry Robinson, and Dick Sprang.
The next time you're haunting your local bookstore, check those acknowledgments; otherwise you may never
know whose words you're reading.
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