"It reflects The Times readership itself." "It's an extremely diverse group of people who make The Times crossword," says Shortz. The youngest person Shortz has published was 13, the oldest person was 101. The average age of contributors has come down by about 15 years - from the early 50s to the late 30s. In Shortz's 25 years as puzzle editor, he has published 37 teenagers and lots of 20- and 30-somethings. In the whole history of the puzzle before Shortz became editor, only six teenagers had gotten puzzles published in The Times. I can tell how the audience has broadened just by the people who contribute to the puzzle." "It used to be you'd think of crosswords as being mainly for older people, and I think that was true before I became editor. And the audience has broadened under Shortz: Shortz became crossword editor in 1993 when Maleska died, and one of his goals has been to modernize the puzzle - to include more current cultural references, more up-to-date language and more playful themes. Will Shortz, Current Editor Extraordinaire But Maleska was a staid guy - he had been a school superintendent in the Bronx, he loved opera and classical music and his puzzles had a more serious tone than Will Weng's." I'd say the wordplay in the crossword themes became more varied and sophisticated under Maleska - it became more a word game than in previous years. Weng retired in 1977 and was succeeded by Eugene T. "He was genuinely a funny man and his sense of humor came through in the puzzles.
"His greatest innovation for The Times crossword was humor," says Shortz. Weng was an old-fashioned news man, but had an abiding love of crosswords - he had been creating puzzles for The Times for years before he became editor. But Farrar thought the crossword should distract people from the harsher aspects of life, which is why, over time, she began to include more entertainment, literature and non-news subjects.įarrar was succeeded in 1969 by Will Weng, who was the head of the Metropolitan desk at The Times before he took the job of crossword editor. At the start, she was given the directive that the puzzle should reflect the information the reader was picking up in the pages of the newspaper - so if you go back to those early puzzles, you'll see a lot of war references. Margaret immediately raised the quality of the crossword above anyone else's - the intellectual calibre of the puzzle, the cultural references and just the quality of the puzzle-making: more interesting vocabulary and fresher, more on-target definitions."įarrar was The Times crossword editor for 27 years, from 1942 to 1969, and the puzzle evolved a bit over that time. She had co-edited all the Simon and Schuster crossword books going back to the very first one in 1924. So, The Times had the good sense to ask Margaret Farrar to be the crossword editor. "It was the start of World War II, and it was thought that people needed to take their minds off the grim war news. "The probably apocryphal story is that Sulzberger was tired of buying the competing New York Herald Tribune to get their crossword," says current New York Times crossword editor Will Shortz. The holdout of The Times might have had something to do with the fact that it had never done comics or entertainment features of any sort - the fun stuff was considered frivolous by its editors.įirst Editor Was a Woman, Margaret Farrar
Simon and Schuster published the first crossword puzzle book that year, and most American newspapers started a crossword between 19. When the crossword puzzle craze gripped the United States in 1924, the paper publicly condemned the fad, publishing a scornful editorial in which it called crosswords the "latest of the problems presented for solution by psychologists interested in the mental peculiarities of mobs and crowds." Which was a pretty sick burn back in 1924. Strangely enough, The New York Times was the last major metropolitan daily newspaper in the country to start a crossword. Pushing 80 years old, The New York Times daily crossword in particular is an American institution. It's relaxing, fun to do alone or with a buddy, and research shows it's good for your brain. If you don't enjoy solving crosswords, your friends or coworkers, parents or grandparents might. These days, lots of people solve the puzzles online or electronically. It used to be a major challenge to try and solve the Sunday puzzle in pen.
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