Richard Matheson

Stanley Grauman Weinbaum was an American science fiction author. His career in science fiction was short but influential. His first story, "A Martian Odyssey", was published to great acclaim in July 1934, but he would be dead from lung cancer within eighteen months. Weinbaum was born in... Louisville, Kentucky and attended school in Milwaukee. He attended the University of Wisconsin–Madison in Madison, first as a chemical engineering major but later switching to English as his major, but contrary to common belief he did not graduate. On a bet, Weinbaum took an exam for a friend, and was later discovered; he left the university in 1923. He is best known for the groundbreaking science fiction short story, "A Martian Odyssey", which presented a sympathetic but decidedly non-human alien, Tweel. Even more remarkably, this was his first science fiction story . Isaac Asimov has described "A Martian Odyssey" as "a perfect Campbellian science fiction story, before John W. Campbell.
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Richard Bachman is a pen name used by horror fiction author Stephen King. At the beginning of Stephen King's career, the general view among publishers was such that an author was limited to a book every year, since publishing more would not be acceptable to the public. King therefore wanted to... write under another name, in order to increase his publication without over-saturating the market for the King "brand." He convinced his publisher, Signet Books, to print these novels under a pseudonym. In his introduction to The Bachman Books, King does state that Bachman was also an attempt to make sense out of his career and try to answer the question of whether his success was due to talent or luck. He says he deliberately released the Bachman novels with as little marketing presence as possible and did his best to "load the dice against" Bachman. King concludes that he has yet to find an answer to the "talent versus luck" question, as he felt that he was outed as Bachman too early to know. The Bachman book Thinner sold 28,000 copies during its initial run—and then ten times as many when it was revealed that Bachman was, in fact, King.
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