Two years ago, a much-admired British historian, Orlando Figes, reviewed himself under the rather threadbare sock-puppet handle of “Historian.” He did not spare himself the tenderness that many authors quietly fantasize about, describing his history of the Soviet Union as “beautiful and necessary.” Mr. Figes might have pulled this off had he not unleashed the Historian puppet on some rivals in a far less generous mood. These unworthies were slammed for their books, which he declared “rubbish” and “awful.” When the curtain was pulled back, Mr. Figes initially blamed his wife, then owned up days later, overtaken by a fit of gallantry.

Tempting though it may be to see sock puppetry as a twisted outcropping of a digital age, it has a deep history. Benjamin Franklin wrote as Silence Dogood and Alice Addertongue, among many — including Richard Saunders, of “Poor Richard’s Almanack.” Kierkegaard published treatises under multiple pseudonyms, then managed the trick of editing himself under still other pseudonyms, earning him bonus sock-puppet points, even if that seems to miss the entire point of having an editor.

No list of early sock puppeteers would be complete without Fernando Pessoa, a Portuguese poet and man of letters in the early 20th century, who created 72 imaginary names to cover his various writing moods and modes; he staged debates among them and had one announcing the death of another, to much grief. Pessoa called these “heteronyms,” a term that lacks the faintly musty notes of sock puppet.

The example of Pessoa was invoked by a leading sock puppeteer of recent times in New York, a man from Greenwich Village named Raphael Golb, whose doctoral dissertation at Harvard was titled “The Problems of Privacy and Trust in Modern Literature.”

Mr. Golb created 72 identities for raucous online debates about the origins of the Dead Sea Scrolls with others who, it turns out, were fighting it out under cover of socks as well. Working from computers in the Bobst Library at New York University, where he went to law school, Mr. Golb also sent e-mails that made embarrassing admissions or assertions on behalf of his opponents. He wrote from Gmail and Yahoo accounts that he created in their names.