I'm posting a series of articles by different authors and want to have the name of the actual authors shown instead of the person who published the article. The only way I can think of is to create a user account with the name of each author and then publish the article with under their username.

Is there any quicker or easier way I can just put any author in, instead of creating them an account?

Thanks

I too wanted that functionality and to my knowledge there is no other way than creating another user account. The only issue with this is that you can't use the same email for the different authors so you will have to create some real or bogus email accounts.

How about doing it this way? Remove the byline and sign the post with the author's name as a clickable link?

You could go to "Style and Edit Center Column" and then remove this line from the loop:
<?php bfa_post_byline('<div class="post-byline">','</div>'); ?>

Thanks for that idea Rosetrees. I had always removed or added byline info in ATO>Edit POST/PAGE INFO ITEMS. That's a great place to remove the byline, footer, or kicker globally.

Thanks for that, I removed that as it was totally unnecessary. I'll just have to make do with having the Author at the end of the article. Should be fine.

Also, how can I remove the "leave a comment" option and the category link from below each article. And is it possible to remove it only on the front page articles and not on the rest of the website?

Check out the Edit POST/PAGE INFO ITEMS section. There are several areas there that will answer your questions.