The Language of Names

As delightful and playful as it is profound and serious, The Language of Names is an absolute original -- a fascinating book that reveals us to ourselves, that demonstrates the endless variety of ways in which names shape our daily lives. Drawing on social and literary history, psychology and anthropology, anecdotes, and life stories, biographer Justin Kaplan and novelist Anne Bernays have written a fascinating account of names and naming in contemporary society that touches on class structure, ethnic and religious practices, manners, and everyday life.

Graceful, eloquent, and richly informed, The Language of Names explores and illuminates our favorite subject -- ourselves.

Justin Kaplan's first full-length book, Mr. Clemens and Mark Twain, won both the Pulitzer Prize for Biography and the National Book Award in Arts and Letters. Among the many other books he has written or edited are biographies of the poet Walt Whitman (for which he won a second National Book Award) and of Lincoln Steffens, the father of investigative journalism. He is General Editor of the sixteenth edition of Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, and of the forthcoming seventeenth edition.