Richard Gehman

Richard Boyd Gehman (May 21, 1921 – May 13, 1972) was an American author of five novels and 15 nonfiction books, as well as more than 3,000 magazine articles, including over 400 features. Gehman wrote under many different pen names, such as Meghan Richards, Frederick Christian, Martin Scott, Michael Robinson and F.C. Uffelman. Biography Gehman attended J. P. McCaskey High School in Lancaster, Pennsylvania and worked on several local daily newspapers before joining the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers in World War II. He served four years as a writer for The Oak Ridge Times in Oak Ridge, Tennessee. After the war he moved to Greenwich Village in New York City and began freelancing for Esquire, Life, Time, Cosmopolitan, Collier's, Argosy, True, Saga, and The Saturday Evening Post magazines. Gehman was an original Contributing Editor at Playboy. Gehman's circle of friends included many well-known American writers, editors, painters, and actors, including Robert Frost, Joseph Heller, E.B. White, Roger Angell, Jackson Pollock, Diane Arbus, Howard Nemerov, Estelle Parsons, Jerry Lewis, Maurice Zolotow, Charlotte Zolotow, Morton Thompson and Anthony Hecht, among others. Maurice Zolotow once claimed that Gehman wrote an entire issue of Cosmopolitan using more than a dozen different pen names; the truth is that Gehman wrote two or three of the principal articles for one issue, each under a different name, plus a record review under the name “Meghan Richards,” and possibly one other regular column. In those days Cosmopolitan used a graphic, diagonal cover banner to highlight special features. Cosmopolitan's editors had a mock-up cover made whose banner bore the legend: "The All Richard Gehman Issue."