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"Minor, William Chester."
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The professor and the madman : a tale of murder, insanity, and the making of the Oxford English dictionary
\"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. 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.\" \"Professor James Murray, an astonishingly learned former schoolmaster and bank clerk, was the distinguished editor of the OED project. Dr. 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. But Minor was no ordinary contributor. He was remarkably prolific, sending thousands of neat, handwritten quotations from his home in the small village of Crowthorne, fifty miles from Oxford. On numerous occasions Murray invited Minor to visit Oxford and celebrate his work, but Murray's offer was regularly-and mysteriously-refused.\" \"Thus the two men, for two decades, maintained a close relationship only through correspondence. 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. 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.\"--Jacket
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Professor and Madman' studies ties between creativity and madness
Minor's extraordinary story, told in Simon Winchester's splendidly researched new book, \"The Professor and the Madman\" (HarperCollins, 242 pages, $22), is so fascinating, in fact, that it has been bought by the French film director Luc Besson for $1 million. The background is straightforward enough: In the early morning hours of Feb. 17, 1872, Dr. Minor, a 37-year-old graduate of Yale Medical School and a battlefield surgeon in the Civil War, shot and killed a total stranger on a shabby London street in the delusional belief that the man, a brewer on his way to work, intended to murder him in his sleep. Judged mentally incompetent to stand trial, Minor was committed to the Asylum for the Criminally Insane in Broadmoor, where he spent the next 37 years; returned to the United States in 1910, he was confined to St. Elizabeth's Hospital in Washington, D.C., until 1918, when he was released to the custody of a nephew in Hartford. He died in obscurity two years later.
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