Can You Guess the Famous Author Based on Their Weird Nickname?

Ernest Hemingway has always been fond of nicknames. As a child, the author imagined he belonged to a family of bears, nicknaming his father Clarence “Da Bear,” his mother Grace “Fweetie” (or “Sweetie”), and his older sister Marcelline “Sissy Bear.” Later, the author himself would become known by the nicknames “Papa,” “Honest Ernie,” and others. His own children also bore the brunt of his fascination with nicknames: John was “Bumby,” Patrick was “Mousie,” and Gregory was “Gigi.”

He’s far from the only acclaimed author to bear a nickname, though it’s possible not all of them seemed to relish it as much as he did. See if you can match the writer to their alternative address in the quiz below.

Some authors have better-known pseudonyms than nicknames. Stephen King wrote as Richard Bachman to avoid publisher concerns that he was too prolific; Susan Eloise Hinton was credited as S.E. Hinton for 1967's The Outsiders to avoid any sexist retorts over a young woman (Hinton was just a teen) writing about street toughs.

There’s also that rarest of literary phenomena: the nickname that becomes a pen name. Charles Dickens published some of his earliest work under the nickname he had once given his brother Augustus, “Moses.” But Dickens purposely pronounced it through his nose, making it sound like “Boses” or “Boz.” Thus, some of the first Dickens stories were authored by “Boz.” He soon dropped it, however, depriving us of perusing A Tale of Two Cities by Boz.

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