Adventures in Biography

Lives and the challenges of writing about them.

by Joshua Kendall

Noah Webster's Touch of Madness and the Birth of American English: Part Two

In a previous post, I discussed Noah Webster's compulsive nature. His "touch of madness" -- his obsession with compiling and organizing information of all sorts -- enabled him to devote thirty years to writing his American Dictionary of the English Language. Read More

Poets and Their Passion for Lexicographers: Plath and Roget, Dickinson and Webster

In the days before the internet, writers used to develop passionate feelings toward the lexicographers whose masterpieces adorned their desks. In her diary entry for February 19, 1956, the young Sylvia Plath, then a graduate student at Cambridge University, writes: "Today my thesaurus, which I would rather live with on a desert isle than a bible, as I have so often boasted cleverly, lay op Read More

Noah Webster's Touch of Madness and the Birth of American English, Part One

Imagine that you are an author and your editor assigns you the task of compiling a massive reference work -- say, a dictionary -- from scratch. This gargantuan project would likely induce feelings of intense anxiety, helplessness and abject despair. "How can I possibly," you might wonder, "manage to define all those words?" Read More

Joshua Kendall is an award-winning journalist. His latest book is The Man Who Made Lists: Love, Death Madness and the Creation of Roget's Thesaurus.

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