Nom de plume -- why a pseudonym?

Many famous authors throughout history have written under pseudonyms that became vastly more well-known than the authors’ real names — Konrad Jozef Korzeniowski wrote under the pen name Joseph Conrad, Charles Lutwidge Dodgson wrote as Lewis Carroll, Eric Arthur Blair wrote as George Orwell, Alisa Zinov’yevan Rosenbaum wrote as Ayn Rand, and Samuel Clemens took the name of Mark Twain. They all had their reasons for choosing a different name.

When Joseph Conrad may be your uncle

My birth name was Daria Olena Korzeniowski. I was born in Philadelphia, PA in 1954 to immigrant parents who left their country, a part of Ukraine at the time ruled by Poland, during World War II.  The town my parents hailed from was near Lviv, called Yaroslaw. But my father, Marian Korzeniowski, originally came from Peremyshl.  Przemyśl in Polish [ˈpʂɛmɨɕl] ( listen) (Ukrainian: Перемишль, Peremyshl, German: Premissel) is a town near where Joseph Conrad was born and raised.