Noah Webster was one of the towering intellects of his generation. Long before he even thought about writing a dictionary, Webster had assumed a place among the nation's founding fathers as the father of cultural independence, whose words reached American minds in every home and classroom and transformed the nation from a Babel of conflicting tongues -- English, Dutch, French, German, and innumerable others -- into the first nation on earth where generations of diverse people would speak and think in one language as one people. - Prologue.