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Richard Bachman was born in New York, and spent nearly a decade-and-a-half of his life in the military. He eventually moved to New Hampshire and began running a dairy farm as his day job. He had a wife, Claudia Inez Bachman, and his family was struck by tragedy when his six-year-old son fell in a well and drowned. His true passion was writing, and before his death in February 1985 he had five books published. He is also 100 percent fictional.
Stephen King created “Richard Bachman” in the late 1970s, and it was in part because his publishers didn’t want to release books as fast as he could write them, but also because of a kind of professional identity crisis. As he describes in the essay “Why I Was Bachman,” he found himself curious if his reputation as a best-selling author had begun to eclipse the substance of his work. An experiment was launched in 1977 with the paperback release of Rage, a novel he began writing when he was still in high school, and it ended in 1985 when King confessed to the pen name, and Bachman subsequently died of cancer of the pseudonym.