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Comment by routerl | Hacker News Reader

It's not that unusual. Tom Clancy has been doing it for decades, and before that "Carolyn Keene" (the collective pseudonym of every Nancy Drew writer).

It's a brand. This brand happens to be presented as a person, a single author. But, as with every brand, scratching the surface reveals more to the story.

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It's quite traditional. Alexander Dumas used ghostwriters to produce a comparable number of books and many old master artists had entire workshops of apprentices producing art in their name.

George Orwell published an essay claiming that the serial school stories then being published (Billy Bunter) were written in such a artificial tone that they were obviously being produced by a series of jobbing writers, provoking an indignant response from the author https://orwell.ru/library/essays/boys/english/e_boys

I feel like this is quite big omission in way we talk about past writers. It is pretty major difference against actually writing that much.

We constantly talk about whether Shakespeare wrote Shakespeare, don't we?

I don't and my school did not. This info was not in in booklets about plays I have seen either.

I have seen that one mentioned couple of times on HN, not elsewhere. Through, I dont care about Shakespeare at all and never discuss him. HN is pretty much only community where Shakespeare gets mentioned frequently (for me for mysterious reasons).

We talk about it critically as an aspect of live entertainment, like TV today, not like it was a problem across every form and we should always be critical of who was a real author or poet in Shakespeare's time period.

AFAIK, Clancy only had one or two ghostwriters near the end of his life that have published subpar books when he was near-death (and posthumously). So it’s not quite the same as a “team of ghostwriters” while Patterson is in the prime of his writing career

And "Franklin W. Dixon" ( Hardy Boys).

Tom Clancy is no longer among us.

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