Joshua Kendall

Award-winning journalist and author of The Man Who Made Lists: Love, Death, Madness, and the Creation of Roget's Thesaurus

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Biography

Joshua Kendall is a freelance journalist and author whose work has appeared in various publications, including Business Week, The Boston Globe, and The Washington Post. He has also co-written three academic psychology books. Kendall is now working on a biography of Noah Webster, the author of Americ …

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Joshua Kendall is a freelance journalist and author whose work has appeared in various publications, including Business Week, The Boston Globe, and The Washington Post. He has also co-written three academic psychology books. Kendall is now working on a biography of Noah Webster, the author of America’s first dictionary, who celebrates his 250th birthday this year.

For his outstanding reporting on psychiatry, he has received national journalism awards from both the National Mental Health Association and the American Psychoanalytic Association. He received a BA from Yale College in comparative literature and graduated summa cum laude. He also did graduate work in comparative literature at Johns Hopkins University. He lives in Boston.

Visit Kendall’s website at www.themanwhomadelists.com.

Photo by Rachel Youdelman
 
Speaking Topics
  • Making the Most of Your Quirks

    How Roget and Webster channeled their obsessions into a creative outlet that both kept them sane and enabled them to produce masterpieces

  • The Rise and Fall of the Printed Word
    • The struggles of Roget and Webster in creating their classic reference works
    • The decline of linguistic standards in the Internet Age