Essays in American Chess History

Essays in American Chess History has been a joy to create. Unlike larger, book length works, the essays here are self-con­tained, small or at least smaller units, each devoted to a different facet of the game that fascinates, infuriates, and forever will re­main mysterious to us all, regardless of the many advancements made in modern tech­nology. The essays may be read individu­ally as well as collectively, and offer the reader glimpses into byways of the past long neglected. They record as well, at least for me, a progression in my thinking about chess, history, and their interrelationship.

In a curious fashion this book crept up on me. For the past few years I have been writing shorter pieces concerning chess history as a kind of break from more con­suming projects, at least more consuming in length and scope. The latter projects in their preparation and execution are more like marathons. The former, more like sprints. Both require significant effort, though of a different kind and style. The shorter works here involve multiple facets of American chess history, from tournaments to players to exhibitions to corre­spondence chess. They evoke a curious spectrum, from ordinary club life to, liter­ally, murder. Diverse as such subjects are, by the time I had written most of the essays appearing in this book, I could see that certain themes had been developed, and that more of a pattern to my writing had emerged than I had ever consciously in­tended. For in every case, it has been the interrelationship of the event, be it match, tournament, or whatever, with the players involved, that has come to the fore in my writing. Bare game scores are no more chess history than is pure biography con­cerning the players, great and small, who have lived and loved the game. In truth, only when the two, the play and the man, or woman, have come together, do I feel I have in part successfully rendered some­thing of my own pleasure in the game and its past, in order to share that pleasure with others. For it is, after all, in a very basic

way, for the readers' pleasure that most authors write. As with chess, where two parties are required to create a masterpiece or a common game, two parties, writer and reader, are required in order to make suc­cessful a literary endeavor about chess and its history. I can only hope whoever reads this book derives from doing so at least some of the pleasure with which it was written. For then indeed, unlike in chess, both parties, writer and reader, can be win­ners.

The essays presented here are grouped in four sections. Section One, Studies in Time, concerns itself mostly with tourna­ments and club play. Included are a selec­tion of both new and previously published pieces. The extended essays on the murder of Major Wilson (Chapter 1) and the Washington Chess Divan championship of 1942 (Chapter 4) are entirely new, never before published pieces. Indeed, their pub­lication outside the confines of such a col­lection as this would be in at least one sense problematic, as they both are of such a length as to be suitable neither for individ­ual publication nor for publication in the more accessible journals. Of course, from my own perspective, they are perfect for just such a volume as this. ..

Introduction