There just weren't quite enough details to bring the two main protagonists to life for me, and a little fictional embellishment might have conveyed all the salient facts while creating more of a page turner. Minor's story is actually quite interesting, and I think I almost would have preferred to see a fictional rendition of his story to this historical narrative. Minor was one of its most prolific contributors. Murray was the leader of the effort to coordinate the volunteers and the writers who compiled the dictionary, and Dr. However, Winchester does a good job of interweaving the intricacies involved with creating the most thorough possible dictionary with the lives of two men, Dr. So The Professor & the Madman may have suffered a little bit by comparison. Unfortunately, I had just read a book that took a fairly similar approach to telling the story of the invention of the birth control pill,, and to me, that story was more engaging with more interesting personalities. Winchester took an interesting approach to telling this story of the creation of the Oxford English Dictionary, a feat that was 70 years in the making.
It was then that Murray finally learned the truth about Minor - that, in addition to being a masterful wordsmith, Minor was also a murderer, clinically insane - and locked up in Broadmoor, England's harshest asylum for criminal lunatics. Finally, in 1896, after Minor had sent nearly ten thousand definitions to the dictionary but had still never traveled from his home, a puzzled Murray set out to visit him. Thus the two men, for two decades, maintained a close relationship only through correspondence. On numerous occasions Murray invited Minor to visit Oxford and celebrate his work, but Murray's offer was regularly - and mysteriously - refused.
He was remarkably prolific, sending thousands of neat, handwritten quotations from his home in the small village of Crowthorne, fifty miles from Oxford.
William Chester Minor, an American surgeon from New Haven, Connecticut, who had served in the Civil War, was one of thousands of contributors who submitted illustrative quotations of words to be used in the dictionary. Professor James Murray, an astonishingly learned former schoolmaster and bank clerk, was the distinguished editor of the OED project. But hidden within the rituals of its creation is a fascinating and mysterious story - a story of two remarkable men whose strange twenty-year relationship lies at the core of this historic undertaking. The creation of the Oxford English Dictionary began in 1857, took seventy years to complete, drew from tens of thousands of brilliant minds, and organized the sprawling language into 414,825 precise definitions.
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