The New York Times discusses the pseudonym history and what's its current state.
From the article...
Perhaps what’s most remarkable about the nom de plume, and rarely talked about, is its power to unlock creativity — and its capacity to withhold it. Even when its initial adoption is utilitarian, a pen name can assume a life of its own. Many writers have been surprised by the intimate and even disorienting relationships they have formed with their alter egos. The consequences can prove grievous and irrevocable.
There is no greater example of the shape-shifting force of a pen name than that of the Portuguese writer Fernando Pessoa, who took the notion of reticence to unparalleled, even pathological levels. In maintaining more than 70 literary identities he called “heteronyms,” he did not employ them as a mode of deception. Instead, he insisted that he was amanuensis to the multiple beings that dwelled within. They transcended gender, ideology and genre. They bickered with one another, mentored one another, clamored for attention like children. He once described his work, aptly, as “a drama divided into people instead of into acts.”
Why Pessoa, whom George Steiner once called “one of the evident giants in modern literature,” had to engage in self-breeding will never be known. The most obvious explanation might be mental illness. That he remained an obscure, isolated figure in his lifetime (he died in 1935) only adds to the poignancy of his — their? — vast creative output. One scholar speculated that Pessoa’s heteronyms were a way to “spare him the trouble of living real life,” which makes his bizarre endeavor seem enviable.
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