Carmela ciuraru biography of william
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Book Review: "Nom de Plume"
Whatever may be the success of my stories,” wrote Mary Ann Evans to an editor in 1857, “I shall be resolute in preserving my incognito, having observed that a nom de plume secures all the advantages without the disagreeables of reputation.” Evans then signed the letter, and all subsequent work, “George Eliot.”
In Nom de Plume: A (Secret) History of Pseudonyms, Carmela Ciuraru (her real name) chronicles the lives of 16 notable authors who wrote under false names, and recounts the lives of the pseudonyms themselves. Samuel Clemens, for example, was born in Missouri in 1835, but Mark Twain was born in Nevada in 1863, and Ciuraru ’96JRN accounts for both their stories. Mary Ann Evans — a woman in Victorian England who not only lived with someone else’s husband, but worse, wrote novels — was exactly right in her assertion that George Eliot’s reputation was more respectable than her own.
Ciuraru doesn’t shy from the “disagreeables of r
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Nom de Plume by Carmela Ciuraru
The Arab Spring has produced many an engrossing story of individual courage. But the story of Amina Abdallah Araf al Omari, while certainly djärv, inventive, and brash, isn’t exactly inspiring. Amina, the purported author of the blog Gay Girl in Damascus, gained a small, dedicated following to her chronicle of life in Syria, where an uprising begun in late January of this year. Amina became “an unlikely hero of revolt,” as The Guardian put it in a May profile, telling stories of her father protecting her from fängelse by Syrian authorities and recounting her struggles to make sense of the change roiling the region.
On June 6, a brev appeared on the site claiming Amina had been detained bygd Syrian authorities, and an online community sprung into action, creating a Facebook page calling for Amina’s release, and advocating for her via tweets tagged #FreeAmina. There was just one problem—Amina was the creation of Tom MacMaster,
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About the Book
Mary Anne Evans. Charles Dodgson. Eric Blair. William Sydney Porter. Or, as they are more commonly remembered, George Eliot, Lewis Carroll, George Orwell, and O. Henry. For these writers and many others, from Mark Twain to Stan Lee to Robert Jordan, the invocation of a nom de plume has been an essential part in the creation of an authorial identity. Now, in a captivating series of biographical snapshots exploring the lives of famous authors and their pen names, author Carmela Ciuraru delivers a unique literary history and a penetrating examination of identity, creativity, and self-creation, revisiting the enduring question—what’s in a name?
Nom de Plume: A (Secret) History of Pseudonyms
by Carmela Ciuraru
- Publication Date: May 29, 2012
- Genres:Biography, History, Nonfiction
- Paperback: 400 pages
- Publisher: Harper Perennial
- ISBN-10: 0061735272
- ISBN-13: 9780061735271