7.6 /10 1 Votes
Originally published 1998 Genre Non-fiction | 3.8/5 Goodreads | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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Nominations National Book Critics Circle Award for General Nonfiction Similar Simon Winchester books, Non-fiction books, English language books | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
The Surgeon of Crowthorne: A Tale of Murder, Madness and the Love of Words is a book by Simon Winchester that was first published in England in 1998. It was retitled The Professor and the Madman: A Tale of Murder, Insanity, and the Making of the Oxford English Dictionary in the United States and Canada.
It tells the story of the making of the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) and one of its most prolific early contributors, Dr. W. C. Minor, a retired United States Army surgeon. Minor was, at the time, imprisoned in the Broadmoor Criminal Lunatic Asylum, near the village of Crowthorne in Berkshire, England. The 'professor' of the American title is the chief editor of the OED during most of the project, Sir James Murray. Murray was a talented linguist and had other scholarly interests, and he had taught in schools and worked in banking. Faced with the enormous task of producing a comprehensive dictionary, with a quotation illustrating the uses of each meaning of each word, and with evidence for the earliest use of each, Murray had turned to an early form of crowdsourcing (a word not coined until the 21st century)—enlisting the help of dozens of amateur philologists as volunteer researchers.
A journalist with three decades of experience, and the author of a dozen travel-inspired books, Winchester's initial proposal to write a book about an obscure lexicographer met with rejection. Only when Harper Collins editor Larry Ashmead read the proposal and championed the book did Winchester pursue the necessary research in earnest. Of the project Ashmead said "we can make lexicography cool". It was Ashmead that persuaded Winchester to call the US edition The Professor and the Madman (over Winchester's objection that Murray was not a professor), saying "No one here knows what the hell a Crowthorne is."
The book was a major success. Winchester went on to write The Meaning of Everything: The Story of the Oxford English Dictionary (2003) about the broader history of the OED.
The movie rights for the book were bought by Mel Gibson's Icon Productions in 1998. John Boorman wrote a script and was at one time tapped to direct, as was Luc Besson. In August 2016 it was announced that Farhad Safinia was to direct an adaptation, starring Gibson as Murray and Sean Penn as Minor.