Author Inspired Dog Names

Literary works from all ages continue to penetrate pop culture and remain relevant.  Sometimes, the literary genius that conceived the concepts and themes are lost over time, but that does not change the impact of their work or the discoverable roots.  Consider the Abominable Snowman from Looney Tunes.  Granted, this dimwitted mythical character preferred bunny rabbits and not dogs, but he loved and hugged his pets to the point of madness after naming them all George.  The inspiration for this Looney Tunes character comes from the literary work of John Steinbeck's Of Mice and Men.  The connection becomes obvious to any high school student reading the novel for the first time but what people often miss is that even John Steinbeck drew his inspiration from the early literary works of Scottish poet, Robert Burns, specifically, his To a Mouse where he muses, "The best-laid schemes of Mice and Men often go askew," which is the English translation.  The power of literature in pop culture is prolific, and many famous dogs in pop culture can draw ties to literary works.  However, some famous dogs are more intimately connected with the literature, the famous pets of the authors themselves.  Pets often serve as inspiration for creative people, and of course, this is not just for the dogs.  Hemingway is famous for his cats as is Mark Twain.  Flannery O'Connor kept peacocks, Charles Dickens had his raven, and Lord Byron had his bear.  However, three famous dogs that inspired literary masters were Pumpkin, Pinka, and Basket.  

Pumpkin was the inseparable companion to American satirist Kurt Vonnegut.  The two were always together, and Vonnegut had a strong love of dogs.  So much was his love of dogs that he incorporated the famous canine character Kazak in several of his novels throughout the years.  Pumpkin was a small,  shaggy Lhasa Apso that was with him for his works in the 1980s.  Other authors found companionship and inspiration in their dogs.  Pinka was the Cocker Spaniel companion to Virginia Woolf, who loved the breed so much that she wrote a semi-fictional biography of poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Cocker Spaniel, Flush.  The short biography was a writing exercise that Woolf completed giving readers and lovers of pet literature a true treat as the work is from the perspective of the Cocker Spaniel named Flush, as the famous companion of Elizabeth Browning.  A final notable famous dog is none other than Gertrude Stein's Poodle, Basket and Basket II.  Stein was notably famous for her avant-garde poetry and modernist lifestyle as well as hosting a Parisian salon that attracted the likes of Picasso, Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Pound, and other cultural giants of the time.  What was not well known was her love of dogs, particularly her Standard Poodle Basket, who was named so because he appeared so fashionable that Stein felt he should always carry a basket of flowers with him.