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http://www.thenation.com/article/159277/minor-exception

WC Minor, the “madman” of Simon Winchester’s compelling narrative about the making of the OED, was no amateur lexciographer, as historians have long assumed.   Three days before the start of the Civil War, he signed a contact to work on a major revision of Webster’s American Dictionary.  And as I show, based on my archival research at Yale’s Beinecke Library, the future star of the OED was an utter failure as an American lexicographer.

In my Psychology Today Blog, I have recently discussed the career of James Gates Percival, the brilliant, but disturbed poet who was Webster’s lone assistant on the dictionary.  Percival bears a striking resemblance to William Chester Minor, the American-born lexicographer who helped James Murray on the OED.

http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/adventures-in-biography

My “American Language Book Tour,” which starts next week, is inspired by America’s first book tour — the one taken by Noah Webster in 1785-1786 to promote his speller.   Webster went up and down America, going from Portsmouth, NH to Savannah, GA.
  
As I explain in Chapter 4 of my book, “Counting His Way Across America,” in each town, Webster would do a personal count of all the houses. In 1788, he published his results in The American Magazine, a NYC literary journal he edited.  The list contained entries such as the following:

Newport 790
Hartford 300
New Haven 400
New York 3340
Philadelphia 4500

I hope to visit most of the towns he did, (though as of yet I have no plans to count any houses).   Seven months before my pub date, I am already slated to appear in those five towns — plus nearly a dozen more — in a total of ten states.

Here’s the first post of my PT blog, “Adventures in Biography.”

http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/adventures-in-biography