The Surgeon of Crowthorne: A Tale of Murder, Madness and the Love of Words is a non-fiction history book by British writer Simon Winchester, 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.
The book tells the story of the making of the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) and one of its most prolific early contributors, William Chester 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" referred to in the North American title is Sir James Murray, the chief editor of the OED during most of the project. Murray was a talented linguist and had other scholarly interests, and 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 enlisted 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 was originally met with rejection. Only when HarperCollins editor Larry Ashmead read the proposal and championed the book did Winchester pursue the necessary research in earnest. [1] Of the project Ashmead said "we can make lexicography cool". [2] It was Ashmead who persuaded Winchester to call the North American 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." [2]
The book was a major success. [3] [4] [5] Winchester went on to write The Meaning of Everything: The Story of the Oxford English Dictionary (2003) about the broader history of the OED.
A film adaptation of the book, starring Mel Gibson as Murray and Sean Penn as Minor and directed by Farhad Safinia under the pseudonym P. B. Shemran, [6] was released in 2019 with the title The Professor and the Madman. The movie rights for the book were bought by Gibson's Icon Productions in 1998. [1] John Boorman wrote a script and was at one time tapped to direct, as was Luc Besson. [1] [7] [8] Production began in 2016, but the release was delayed by legal disputes between parties in the film's production. [9]
A dictionary is a listing of lexemes from the lexicon of one or more specific languages, often arranged alphabetically, which may include information on definitions, usage, etymologies, pronunciations, translation, etc. It is a lexicographical reference that shows inter-relationships among the data.
The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) is the principal historical dictionary of the English language, published by Oxford University Press (OUP). It traces the historical development of the English language, providing a comprehensive resource to scholars and academic researchers, as well as describing usage in its many variations throughout the world.
A Dictionary of the English Language, sometimes published as Johnson's Dictionary, was published on 15 April 1755 and written by Samuel Johnson. It is among the most influential dictionaries in the history of the English language.
William Chester Minor, was an American army surgeon, psychiatric-hospital patient, and lexicographical researcher.
Frederick James Furnivall was an English philologist, best known as one of the co-creators of the New English Dictionary. He founded a number of learned societies on early English literature and made pioneering and massive editorial contributions to the subject, of which the most notable was his parallel text edition of The Canterbury Tales. He was one of the founders of and teachers at the London Working Men's College and a lifelong campaigner against injustice.
Henry Bradley, FBA was a British philologist and lexicographer who succeeded James Murray as senior editor of the Oxford English Dictionary (OED).
Sir William Alexander Craigie was a philologist and a lexicographer.
Sir James Augustus Henry Murray, FBA was a Scottish lexicographer and philologist. He was the primary editor of the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) from 1879 until his death.
Simon Winchester is a British-American author and journalist. In his career at The Guardian newspaper, Winchester covered numerous significant events, including Bloody Sunday and the Watergate Scandal. Winchester has written or contributed to more than a dozen nonfiction books, has written one novel, and has contributed to several travel magazines, among them Condé Nast Traveler, Smithsonian Magazine, and National Geographic.
Robert William Burchfield CNZM, CBE was a lexicographer, scholar, and writer, who edited the Oxford English Dictionary for thirty years to 1986, and was chief editor from 1971.
The Meaning of Everything: The Story of the Oxford English Dictionary is a 2003 book by Simon Winchester. It concerns the creation of the Oxford English Dictionary under the editorship of James Murray and others, one aspect of which Winchester had previously written about in 1998 in The Surgeon of Crowthorne: A Tale of Murder, Madness and the Love of Words.
Beryl T. "Sue" Atkins was a British lexicographer, specialising in computational lexicography, who pioneered the creation of bilingual dictionaries from corpus data.
Thomas T. Minor was a physician, businessman, civic and political leader who founded the Seattle, Lake Shore and Eastern Railway and served as mayor of Seattle and Port Townsend, Washington.
Mel Gibson is an American actor, director, and producer, who made his acting debut on the Australian television drama series The Sullivans (1976–1983). While a student at the National Institute of Dramatic Art in Sydney, he was given an uncredited role in I Never Promised You a Rose Garden and subsequently appeared as a leading actor in the micro budget surf drama Summer City. Gibson rose to prominence during the Australian New Wave cinema movement in the early 1980s, having appeared in his breakthrough role in George Miller's dystopian action film Mad Max (1979), portraying the eponymous hero. He reprised the role in its sequels, Mad Max 2 (1981) and Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome (1985). He appeared in Peter Weir's war drama Gallipoli (1981) and the romantic drama The Year of Living Dangerously (1982). Five years later he played Martin Riggs in the buddy cop action comedy Lethal Weapon alongside Danny Glover—a role he later reprised in its sequels Lethal Weapon 2 (1989), Lethal Weapon 3 (1992), and Lethal Weapon 4 (1998).
Lawrence Peel "Larry" Ashmead was an American book editor who helped create many books featuring such authors as Isaac Asimov, Quentin Crisp, Tony Hillerman, Susan Isaacs, Michael Korda, and Helen Van Slyke, for a series of publishers including Doubleday, Simon & Schuster, Lippincott, Harper & Row and its successor HarperCollins.
Meanderings of Memory is a rare book published in London in 1852 and attributed to Nightlark. Although it is cited as a first or early source for over 50 entries in the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), the current OED editors have been unable to locate a surviving copy. OED editors made their search for the elusive source public in May 2013.
The Professor and the Madman is a 2019 biographical drama film directed by Farhad Safinia, from a screenplay by Safinia and Todd Komarnicki based on the 1998 book The Surgeon of Crowthorne by Simon Winchester. It stars Mel Gibson, Sean Penn, Natalie Dormer, Eddie Marsan, Jennifer Ehle, Jeremy Irvine, David O'Hara, Ioan Gruffudd, Stephen Dillane, and Steve Coogan.
Todd Komarnicki is an American playwright, novelist, screenwriter, director, and producer.
Professor and the Madman is a four-piece American rock band featuring co-frontmen/songwriters Alfie Agnew and Sean Elliott, drummer Rat Scabies and bassist Paul Gray. Agnew had been in the punk bands Adolescents and D.I. and Elliott had played guitar in D.I. Scabies and Gray were the rhythm section of The Damned, and they appeared together on a pair of The Damned's studio albums: The Black Album (1980) and Strawberries (1982). Gray also played in Eddie and the Hot Rods and UFO.