Larry J. Hoefling

Novel Last Names: Surname Meanings for the Creative Fiction Writer Larry J. Hoefling

The creative author may select names for characters arbitrarily, accidentally, or as a matter of deliberate planning, but the names can make all the difference. James Bond, Uriah Heep, Dirk Pitt, Silas Marner, Ebenezer Scrooge - all examples of names intimately idenfified with their characters and seemingly inherent to the type of stories they inhabit. Novel Last Names offers the author the opportunity to make appropriate choices, with thousands of alphabetically listed last names indexed by place of origin and meaning. No writer wants the hammer-wielding workman to be named Mr. Carpenter, but there is nothing wrong with taking a little surreptitious pleasure in naming the Hollywood plastic surgeon Dr. Case, whose name in medieval times described the maker of chests. Includes cognate forms, place of origin, and meaning.