Without Peter Mark Roget, there would be no Visual Thesaurus — or any modern thesaurus for that matter. We now take it for granted, but it took a special type of mind to come up with a system for organizing and classifying words and their meanings, in a way that also organizes human knowledge itself. Roget, a nineteenth-century polymath who wrote treatises on everything from physiology to slide rules, certainly had the mind for it. But he also had a deeply troubled personal life, surrounded by mental illness and heartbreaking tragedy. Joshua Kendall has written a fitting tribute to this fascinating figure in his new biography, The Man Who Made Lists: Love, Death, Madness, and the Creation of Roget's Thesaurus. We got to talk to Josh about the making of the book, and learned how his previous writing about psychology turned out to be an excellent preparation for exploring Roget's intricate mental world. Here is part one of our interview.

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