The Running Man

Richard Bachman is a pseudonym of author Stephen King. Bachman was born in New York. He spent several years serving in the U.S. Coast Guard and the merchant marine before settling down on a New Hampshire dairy farm.

Bachman published four novels in paperback between 1977 and 1982. The hardcover novel "Thinner" was published in 1984. In 1994, Bachman's widow discovered a carton containing a manuscript of the novel "The Regulators," which was published posthumously in 1996. The last Bachman title, Blaze, was publshed in 2007.

Bachman died in 1985. His identity remained a well-kept secret until a bookstore clerk confronted King with his suspicions that King was Bachman. The clerk, Steve Brown, could not believe that Bachman and King were not one and the same. Brown located publisher's records at the Library of Congress and discovered a document naming King as the author of one of Bachman's novels. Afterwards he sent a letter to King's publishers, with a copy of the found documents, and asked them what to do. Two weeks later Stephen King phoned Brown personally, and suggested he write an article about how he discovered the truth, allowing himself to be interviewed. This led to a press release heralding Bachman's "death" supposedly from "cancer of the pseudonym," and an article written by Brown in the Washington Post.

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