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David Warren "Doc" Maurer (April 12, 1906 – June 11, 1981) was a professor of linguistics at the University of Louisville from 1937 to 1972. He was the writer of numerous studies of the language of the American underworld.[1][2]
Maurer received a doctorate from the Ohio State University in Comparative Literature in 1935. He began teaching in Louisville in 1937 while living on a farm in nearby Jeffersontown. He married Barbara Elinore "Countess" Starbuck on 12 June 1937 in Highland County, Ohio.[3] He spent much of his academic career studying the language of criminals, drug addicts, and other marginal subcultures. He claimed he decided not to seek employment at Tulane University after he was warned that the organized crime in New Orleans would not welcome his academic pursuits to study them.[2]
In 1974, he filed a $10 million lawsuit (equivalent to $61,781,377 in 2023) charging that the movie The Sting and the book of the same name had been copied from his book The Big Con. The lawsuit was settled out of court in 1976 for an estimated $600,000 (equivalent to $3,212,632 in 2023).[4][5]
A traffic collision in 1970 "severely limited his activity by unremitting pain and, ultimately, almost total blindness."[2] He died at his home in Jeffersontown from a self-inflicted gunshot wound.[1][5]
The Big Con[6][7] is Maurer's most popular and perhaps most important book.[according to whom?] The source material for it came from Maurer's correspondence, interviews, and informal chats with hundreds of underworld denizens during the 1930s. Among the interviewed criminals were such figures as Joseph "The Yellow Kid" Weil, Charles Gondorff and Limehouse Chappie. Maurer won the trust of hundreds of grifters, who let him in on their language and their methods.[citation needed] The book served as a source for the film The Sting as well as the episode "Horseplay" from The Adventures of Harry Lime.
Maurer also wrote The American Confidence Man[8] and three other books: Narcotics and Narcotic Addiction,[9] Whiz Mob: A Correlation of the Technical Argot of Pickpockets with Their Behavior Pattern,[10] and Kentucky Moonshine.[11] In all these books, Maurer described the language, mostly the lexicon, of the people living in these "subcultures". For example, in the last book, he focused on the craft of the moonshiners, discussed their infiltration of "dry" counties and reported their terminology.[citation needed] Language of the Underworld[12] is a collection of several of his previous published articles collected by two of his students. It includes an introduction that describes the methods he used to collect criminal argot.
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