Literary Dog Names

The spelling Woolf inevitably conjures writer Virginia. If you're a fan of Mrs. Dalloway and the Bloomsbury group, Woolf might be a creative way to combine a trendy animal name with an original honor name. Woolf was the surname of Virginia's husband, Leonard.

Orleanna was the young heroine of Barbara Kingsolver's The Poisonwood Bible.

Old fashioned nickname that some girls just might be able to pull off. You'd just have to be sure your little Fancy was one of them.

Japhy Ryder was a hero of Jack Kerouac's Dharma Bums. Compared with Moses and Noah, Japhy sounds downright adorable and eminently baby-worthy.

This name of a character in Faulkner's As I Lay Dying is short, sweet and Southern-sounding.

Plausible literary name to honor upbeat Armenian-American playwright and prose writer William Saroyan.

Pretty and distinctive choice for poetry lovers.

An occupation name that sounds odd to the modern ear but enjoyed some use a century ago. May make a comeback as a more genteel brother to the new union of boys (and girls) with worker names such as Mason, Carter, and Bailey.

Faunia is more often rendered as Fauna, who was a Roman goddess of fertility, women and healing. Faunia was the downtrodden yet loving heroine of Philip Roth's Human Stain. Faunia and Fauna have more gravitas than the doe-like Fawn.

A solid, brief but not brusque single-syllable surname with a presidential pedigree.

Writer Jerzy Kosinski put this foreign variation on the U. S. name map.

Surname from a landscape feature, associated with author Gore Vidal and Bill Clinton's Vice President Al Gore. Its alternative meaning - as in gory - may explain why it's never made it into the charts.

Name of the winning young heroine of Toni Morrison's first novel, The Bluest Eye.

Forster, a variation of Foster or potentially even Forester, is associated with British novelist E.M. Forster, author of A Passage to India, Howard's End, and A Room with a View. But if you choose Forster, you'd always have to force that 'r'.

Associated with the poet and novelist Galway Kinnell, this name of an Irish city, county, and bay would make an evocative choice. For further literary cred, writers Liam O'Flaherty and Frank Harris both hail from Galway.

The surname of humorist Ring is a new entry in the trendy occupational class -- but watch the lard.

An interesting Canadian province and city name that has some literary history as the name of a character in Dickens's Bleak House; could make a distinctive choice for parents with northern roots.

Nenna is the name of the heroine of Penelope Fitzgerald's novel Offshore, but it's also sparingly used in Scandinavia as a variant of the name Nanna. Nanna is a diminutive of various names, including Anna, Johanna and Marianne, but it's also a name in its own right, possibly meaning "daring".

Might be carrying things too far -- little little girl? -- though could freshen up this favorite.

The name of the protagonist of The Hunchback of Notre Dame does not translate well into real life. Quasimodo comes from the Latin phrase used in Christian texts, "Quasi modo geniti infantes", meaning "like just-born infants do".