Photo by Rachel Youdelman about the author
Joshua Kendall
Award-Winning Journalist and Author of The Man Who Made Lists and The Forgotten Founding Father
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. His most recent book, The Forgotten Founding Father: Noah Webster’s Obsession and the Creation of an American Culture, was published by Putnam in April 2011.
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.
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Press Links
"Publishing’s Founding Father"
The Daily Beast
"America’s First Great Global Warming Debate"
Smithsonian.com
"Webster’s First"
The Weekly Standard
"Noah Webster, Founding Father"
The New York Times Book Review
The Forgotten Founding Father Review
The Washington Independent Review of Books
"Our Founding Wordsmith"
The Daily Beast
"Joshua Kendall's Forgotten Founding Father Gives Us the Man Behind Our Words"
Cleveland Plain Dealer
The Forgotten Founding Father Review
The Los Angeles Times
"How Noah Webster Shaped American Language"
WNYC Radio's The Takeaway
"Noah Webster Helped Define American Culture"
Worcester Telegram & Gazette
"Webster and American Nationalism"
The Washington Post
"A Definitive American Life"
The Wall Street Journal
"A Fever for Knowledge"
The Daily
"Author Details Noah Webster's Life in New Haven"
New Haven Register
"A Minor Exception: On W.C. Minor and Noah Webster"
The Nation
"Redefining Webster's"
Johns Hopkins Magazine
Extended Interview with Joshua Kendall by Ben Zimmer, Part One
Visual Thesaurus
Extended Interview with Joshua Kendall by Ben Zimmer, Part Two
Visual Thesaurus
"Inquiring Minds"
The Boston Globe
"The Literary Lion Who Hated Us, And Why We Love Him Anyway"
The Boston Globe
"The Definition of Yankee Know-How"
The Los Angeles Times
"Books on the Brilliantly Disturbed"
The Wall Street Journal
"Field Guide to the Obsessive-Compulsive: Famously Fussy"
Psychology Today
"A Revealing Look at Twain's Last Years of Dark Self-Absorption"
The Boston Globe
Featured Book
The Forgotten Founding Father
"Mr. Kendall is a careful writer, and a gifted storyteller . . . [The Forgotten Founding Father is] an engaging, almost novel-like read.”
—The Wall Street Journal
“Joshua Kendall gives us a lively and insightful biography, the best picture we have of Webster’s complex character.”
—New York Times Book Review
Speaking Topics
- Making the Most of Your Quirks
- 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
- The Story of the American Language
- The History of English Dictionaries From the 18th Century to the Present
View Topic Descriptions »
Speaking Topics — Joshua Kendall
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
The Story of the American Language
The History of English Dictionaries From the 18th Century To the Present
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