Throughout history pseudonyms have been used for diverse reasons in many fields of knowledge. In the literature of prestige, authors have hidden their identity behind the mask of a pseudonym for reasons such as the preservation of their identity in cases of political or religious persecution or in order to write texts considered to transgress the social norms of acceptability. In the realm of popular narrative, the use of pseudonyms is linked both to the phenomenon of pseudotranslation, that it, texts written in the native language and presented as if they were translations of works written by foreign authors, and to censorship. In this type of literary texts, this practice seems more conspicuous than in any other field of literature. This descriptive study, which is based on a catalogue of 730 censorship files compiled at the Administration General Archive for the period from 1939 to 1975, explores the relation between the use of pseudonyms, pseudotranslation and self-censorship during the Franco dictatorship in the narrative of the West. It examines the pseudonyms coined by authors when creating their new identities, and attempts to identify what governmental, political and economic measures influenced the disproportionate use of these self-constructions in the Western.