ELON COLLEGE – Simon Winchester, author of the national bestseller, “The Professor and the Madman,” will speak at 7 p.m. Nov. 16 in Whitley Auditorium on the Elon College campus. The speech is free and open to the public.
Winchester’s book retells the true story of two remarkable men and their roles in the preparation of the 16-volume Oxford University Dictionary. One of those men, Dr. W.C. Minor, who contributed more than 10,000 entries, was an American expatriate in England and a Civil War veteran. He also was a patient at Broadmoor Criminal Lunatic Asylum, where he was committed for murdering a British brewery worker.
The project’s director, Oxford University Professor James Murray, at first assumed that the “doctor” he was corresponding with at Broadmoor was a member of the hospital staff, not a mentally ill patient. The men’s eventual meeting and ongoing friendship, based on a mutual respect for one another’s scholarship, is at the heart of the book.
Winchester, who is an experienced journalist and the author of 12 highly regarded travel books, gained access to Minor’s records. The author learned that a remorseful Minor gave money to the family of his innocent victim and became friendly with the man’s wife who visited him in the hospital.
A New York Times review of the book called it an “imaginative retelling of these two ‘inextricably and most curiously entwined lives…’ ”
Winchester’s latest book, “The Fracture Zone: A Return to the Balkans” explores the historical, geographical and temperamental roots of the ongoing violence in the region.
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