His abrasiveness toward authority has resulted in him being unemployed and blackballed, but he needs money so that he can get medicine for his sick baby daughter and avoid his wife resorting to work as a prostitute. Set in the spectacularly bleak and now-not-too-distant-future of 2025, The Running Man is the tale of Ben Richards – whom we meet at a point of desperation. He completed it in about 72 hours, and “Why I Was Bachman” adds the detail that it was printed “with virtually no changes.” The author was struck by the concept for the dystopia-set book, and when he started committing it to paper he practically didn’t stop until it was done. Stanley Wiater, Christopher Golden, and Hank Wagner’s The Complete Stephen King Universe dates the origins of The Running Man to 1971, shortly after Stephen King completed the original draft of what would become his first published novel: Carrie.

That being said, one way in which the work was comparable is in the fact that it still inspired Hollywood to come calling, as producer Rob Cohen purchased the film rights to 1982’s The Running Man without knowing the true identity of the author. In terms of the professional identity crisis side of things, the experiment didn’t yield much in the way of affirming results, as none of the Richard Bachman paperbacks ended up selling in quantities analogous to the novels sold with the author’s real name (King admits he hampered sales by requesting that the releases be “low profile”). 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. 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. 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.

The running man book richard bachman