Reclusive Artist / Authors

• H. P. Lovecraft as a young man rarely went outside during the day, was shamed by his mother into hiding his appearance in his childhood, and admitted to being nervous around people. In later years he was more relaxed about these things and traveled as extensively as his limited finances would permit.
• Christopher Tolkien, son of J. R. R. Tolkien. While he had given some statements in press releases, he is a very private man and had only given one interview in his entire life prior to his death on January 16, 2020.
• Ann Radcliffe (1764-1823), pioneer of the Gothic Novel best known for The Mysteries of Udolpho and The Italian. Little is known of her life. According to the Edinburgh Review, "She never appeared in public, nor mingled in private society, but kept herself apart, like the sweet bird that sings its solitary notes, shrouded and unseen." Christina Rossetti had to abandon a biography of her life due to a lack of information. Turns out she had just retired from writing for the most part and was doing ordinary things for a married lady her age, like walking in the park and going to church.
• J. D. Salinger was famous for being reclusive ever since reaching his late forties. Despite his reputation, his neighbors recall him as being very sociable; it was his readers he actively avoided - perhaps with good reason.
• Arthur C. Clarke lived out his later years in Sri Lanka, making this a borderline case (his residence wasn't a secret, but he did assiduously avoid public appearances).
• John Swartzwelder, who has written many episodes of The Simpsons as well as a few novels. Some fans even suspect that there is no real Swartzwelder, with the name covering a collaboration between two or more of the rest of the show's staff, and he notoriously refuses to give interviews or appear in Simpsons audio commentaries. He was apparently entrapped into a DVD commentary for the episode "The Cartridge Family", but it's still unknown if this was the real Swartzwelder and he ended his appearance by denying this. He did, however, respond to a journalist about his failed Pistol Pete project and allowed a rare photo of him to be included in the article. (He’s the guy with the short white beard, white shirt, and light blue pants.) Finally, in May 2021, he granted an interview to the New Yorker. He also opened a Twitter account in 2016, which was confirmed as the real Swartzwelder by several crewmembers and eventually by the man himself, but almost all of his tweets are excerpts from his books. He's also apparently a big baseball fan and posted a photo of himself hitting a home run at Safeco Field in Seattle on his Twitter account.
• Thomas Ligotti has been called the J.D. Salinger of the Cosmic Horror Story. Early on, there were even questions as to whether the man actually existed, with some claiming that he was actually a pseudonym for a more famous writer. In interviews, he cites various health conditions, such as chronic anxiety and agoraphobia are contributing to his seclusion.
• Alan Moore is a borderline case. He quite often does book signings and stuff like that, and he is interviewed very frequently. He doesn't travel abroad and no longer goes to conventions after some fan followed him into the bathroom and pestered him for an autograph.
  "I don't have any designs on being a screenwriter. For one thing, that would mean moving out of Northampton, and I already can't imagine that. I very seldom even leave this end of the living room. The other end of the living room is a foreign place where they do things differently, and where I feel a bit nervous."
• Cormac McCarthy often had conversations with journalists, but he hated giving interviews, talking about his own work, or even talking about writing. The one exception was when he went on Oprah, of all things. This was averted in 2022, a year before his passing, when he did a few interviews after releasing 2 new books yet still refrained from talking about writing.
• Harper Lee. Due to her age when she died and near-total lack of public appearances, rumors had constantly circulated that she was dead (which did happen on February 19, 2016). She lived just long enough to publish a Mockingbird prequel called Go Set a Watchman (it's the first draft of Mockingbird, with an adult Jean Louise and a few flashbacks; she was advised that the flashbacks were more interesting so she rewrote the whole thing) the year before her death. Prior to that, she did emerge from seclusion long enough to be awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2007.
• American novelist Thomas Pynchon never gives interviews and makes no public appearances. His reclusiveness was parodied on The Simpsons, where he was depicted with a brown paper bag over his head and hawking merchandise to passers-by, offering them to "get your picture taken with a reclusive author." Believe it or not, he was actually voiced by Thomas Pynchon himself (the only time his voice has been broadcast in the media, except for another Simpsons appearance and a trailer to his novel Inherent Vice).
• Patrick Dennis, author of Auntie Mame and other popular novels, hid behind his pseudonym all his life and, in his twilight years, maintained his anonymity by butlering in California. Part of this secrecy was probably due to his homosexuality.
• Rowena Farre, author of Seal Morning. When her book's popularity grew, her publisher was forced to expend considerable effort to find her. It was discovered that her real name was Lois Parr. Subsequently, she published under another name. There is some disagreement concerning her date of birth—she may have been 26 or 35 when her book was published.
• Thomas Harris, author of The Silence of the Lambs and its sequels and prequels. He didn't grant any interviews from 1976 until 2019 when he talked to the New York Times to promote his novel Cari Mora. In that interview, he explained that his books sold well even though he didn't grant interviews, so he didn't grant interviews.
• John Twelve Hawks, author of The Fourth Realm trilogy, lives off the grid, has never appeared in public and his name is of course actually a pseudonym. Not even his editor knows who he is; he communicates with his publisher using the Internet and an untraceable satellite phone.
• S. E. Hinton wrote The Outsiders while she was in high school; her agent suggested using her initials, assuming that reviewers would dismiss a novel written by a teenage girl. She kept the name for later books to help separate her work from her personal life. Although she makes cameos in movies based on her work, she's avoided public appearances outside of a few awards ceremonies. She was also interviewed in 2018 for PBS' Great American Read, when The Outsiders was one of the hundred novels chosen as the greatest ever written by a public poll.^note An exposé back in the late 1990s claimed this happens more often than you might think; some books that we think of as written by adults are actually by teens and even children. This is coming out in the open more, with more research on how to help and even book fairs focused on younger authors.
• Leo Tolstoy was notoriously impossible to interview and hated dealing with the public. He was especially wary of the new invention of the movie camera in the early 20th century. Reporters would hide out and try to ambush him. (You can see this in the film The Last Station.) One such reporter, much like the others, hid out for 3 days waiting to ambush him on the way home with his family. Instead of succeeding, he accidentally broke his film camera which literally brought him to tears. Taking pity on the man, Tolstoy helped him take his camera to a blacksmith shop to repair it after which he agreed to be filmed. This started a relationship with the only man ever allowed to film Tolstoy. And that's not even getting into his later life when he renounced his title and possessions and started traveling the world (granted, he only did this shortly before his death).
• French Canadian novelist and playwright Réjean Ducharme was extremely reclusive: he gained fame as soon as his first novel was published in 1966, but made no public appearance nor interview from then on (he died in 2017). Especially in the early decades of his career, there have been rumors that he didn't really exist and that his name was the pseudonym of this or that famous author. Very few photographs of him have surfaced.
• Patrick Süskind, author of Perfume, has not published a novel since 1991, and never grants interviews or allows photographs of himself to be taken.
• Shane Stevens, author of the crime novels By Reason of Insanity (a precursor to The Silence of the Lambs), The Anvil Chorus and Dead City, which Stephen King called "the finest novels ever written about the dark side of the American dream." He has said of himself that, "I am very secretive...I never give interviews, stay in shadow, travel by night."
• B. Traven, who took this trope to its Logical Extreme: his identity was never revealed during his lifetime and is still uncertain, as is whether the original language of his books was English or German.
• Henry Darger, during his life was a hospital janitor who kept mostly to himself. Shortly before his death it was discovered that he wrote a 15,000-page novel called [deep breath] The Story of the Vivian Girls, in What is Known as the Realms of the Unreal, of the Glandeco-Angelinian War Storm, Caused by the Child Slave Rebellion. With copious illustrations.
• Russian Postmodernist writer Viktor Pelevin is (in)famous for his incredibly private lifestyle. He makes public appearances once in a blue moon, always wearing Cool Shades covering his face, and gives no interviews; the few known details of his life are contradictory and unreliable. While his novels are invariably bestsellers and critical hits, Pelevin as a man remains a mystery. When it comes to reclusiveness, he is the Russian answer to Thomas Pynchon.
• Elena Ferrante is one of Italy's most famous contemporary authors. She's also so reclusive that her name is a pseudonym, and she refuses to say anything outside of letters written to her editor and publisher as she believes that books have no need for their authors once complete and has a fierce desire to maintain her privacy. It was speculated that she is a pseudonym of Domenico Starnone based on samples of their writing, but he firmly denies it, to which the media then shifted the speculation to his wife, Anita Raja, a well-known translator. An Italian journalist published an article claiming that Raja is Ferrante based on finance records as well as her family tree records, but the public response to the article has been negative as her readers were completely fine with the anonymity and felt it lent greater merit to her work. The article was also perceived by her publisher, some authors, journalists, and literary circles as a gross violation of journalistic ethics and Raja's privacy, whether or not she's the true author.
• June and Jennifer Gibbons probably count as this, since they pretty much lived as Hikikomori but were very much engaged in writing novels and screenplays. June-Alison's Pepsi-Cola Addict, self-published in 1982, has been reprinted in 2022 and 2023.
• Until April 2015, nothing was known about K. J. Parker. Finally, it was revealed that K.J. Parker was the pseudonym of Tom Holt, for works in a very different style from his own-name work.
• Rosemary Wells, of Max and Ruby and Timothy Goes to School fame, doesn't have that much info about her life being a writer and has a short biography about her life on her official website. She did do some interviews on some websites such as The Japan Times and was featured on the news at one point years ago, but it's still not that much. Definitely somewhat less of an example than others, though, because she is known to do public appearances, and a video about her career and life called A Visit with Rosemary Wells is available from Scholastic. She is also known to advocate for children's literacy.
• V. C. Andrews, though not to the extent as other authors on this page. Allegedly, she was a very private person and even burned her first manuscript because it was unintentionally autobiographical. She was also reluctant to do interviews and other public events after People Magazine published an interview that she deeply disliked for being inaccurate and unflattering.
• Angus Oblong, the author of the Black Comedy book Creepy Susie and 13 Other Tragic Tales for Troubled Children, which was the basis of the show, The Oblongs, seems to prefer some amount of anonymity (albeit with a bit of a twist), preferring to go under his pen name (although his real name has been revealed), appearing on special features of The Oblongs DVD with his face blacked out and voice distorted, and making public appearances wearing clown makeup.
• Anne Perry, creator of The Charlotte and Thomas Pitt Series, allowed very little personal information to be made public for the first decade and a half of her writing career. Then we found out why: she's actually Juliet Hulme, who along with her friend Pauline Parker murdered Parker's mother in one of New Zealand's most notorious murder cases, as was brought to light when the film adaptation of the story Heavenly Creatures renewed interest in what had become of them.
• Author and illustrator Walter Moers has refused to be photographed since the mid-'90s and communicates at most via email.
• The ultimate example may be William Shakespeare, whose only public information we have is his name on various lawsuits.
• Science Fiction author and Scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard, in the last few years of his life, went into hiding due to numerous legal troubles and would reportedly only speak to a few trusted individuals. What's notable about this time is he published his first fictional books in decades, including Battlefield Earth.
• Kinoko Nasu, the co-founder of Type-Moon and creator of the Nasuverse, is a case where he's much more comfortable with written discussion only in a controlled environment, having used his long-running blog from the early '00s and magazine interviews as his main avenue for communicating with fans. He only represents himself with the Author Avatar of a mushroom (a pun on his first name being also read as "mushroom") and only one known photo◊ of him is of the back of his head. He's not going to drop the anonymity any time soon, as he's spoken about how he enjoys being able to go about conventions without anyone paying attention to him. A lot of people mistook Yosuke Shiokawa, the former^note He left development in 2021 game producer of Fate/Grand Order, for Nasu which doesn't help that doing a quick Google search would automatically show Shiokawa's picture instead.
• Kazuma Kamachi, the author of A Certain Magical Index, A Certain Scientific Railgun, A Certain Scientific Accelerator, Heavy Object, The Circumstances Leading to Waltraute's Marriage and The Zashiki Warashi of Intellectual Village, is almost a living paradox. He never appears in public, uses a face made of simple shapes as an online avatar, and "Kazuma Kamachi" is a pen name. Kiyotaka Haimura (A Certain Magical Index's illustrator) and Yuyuko Takemiya (Toradora!'s author) have met him in person. Kiyotama only commented that he seems to be a sports-oriented guy, and Yuyuko commented that he's very young-looking. On top of this, his love for the craft and the sheer volume of his work output makes his dedication obvious. He is currently in the process of writing five different manga and light novel series all at the same time, and his coworkers have revealed that he currently has enough manuscripts and story ideas stockpiled that he could completely quit writing and still be able to output fresh material for over a year. And yet he still does almost nothing but write.
  "If I don’t keep writing, I’ll crash. Like an airplane."
• Virtually nothing is known about Elly Conway, author of the spy novel Argylle which had been optioned for a film by Universal and Apple TV+ prior to its publication. The only things proving her existence are an Instagram account with no posts and a two-line bio that merely says she lives in the US, and any attempts to contact her or any parties associated with her were unsuccessful. As it turns out, this was just an extremely subtle case of Viral Marketing: the trailer reveals Elly Conway to be the main character of the movie, an introverted author of spy novels whose books are being used as inspiration for a criminal organization. In February 2024, it was revealed that the Argylle novel was written by British authors Terry Hayes and Tammy Cohen.

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