The Queen's Gambit (novel)

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A novel by Walter Tevis (author of The Hustler and The Color of Money) about fictional chess prodigy Beth Harmon, published in 1983 by Random House. Named after a chess opening favored by the protagonist, The Queen's Gambit traces Harmon's life from her childhood in an orphanage through her struggles with tranquilizer and alcohol addiction to her triumphant rise through the Grandmaster ranks.

The novel is hard to classify, occupying a space between thriller, sports/game novel and bildungsroman. It has cult status for its addictive plot:

“The Queen's Gambit is sheer entertainment. It is a book I reread every few years--for the pure pleasure and skill of it.” --Michael Ondaatje (cover of Vintage paperback edition, 2003)

and for the technical accuracy of its depictions of chess:

New Yorker's reviewer was especially enthused with the novelist's recreation of the obsessive world of chess, noting that Tevis "does succeed in conveying the cerebral suspense with which would-be World Champions live." Harold C. Schonberg, writing in the New York Times Book Review, confirmed that Tevis "reveals a great deal about the world of American Chess, with a final glance at how the Russians operate, and it is an exceptionally accurate picture that he draws." Schonberg added: "Beth Harmon may not be prepossessing, but she has the dedication of a Biblical saint, a freak memory and an ability to synthesize and create and blow her little world apart with a kind of startling originality that nobody else can match. That is what chess on its highest level is all about." (From Contemporary Authors Online 2007, Gale Reference)

Tevis based the chess scenes on his own experience as a class C player and on his long study of the game (The Queen's Gambit, endnote "About the Author"), and he elaborates on this in the Author's Note:

The superb chess of Grandmasters Robert Fischer, Boris Spassky and Anatoly Karpov has been a source of delight to players like myself for years. Since The Queen's Gambit is a work of fiction, however, it seemed prudent to omit them from the cast of characters, if only to prevent contradiction of the record.

I would like to express my thanks to Joe Ancrile, Fairfield Hoban and Stuart Morden, all excellent players, who helped me with books, magazines, and tournament rules. And I was fortunate to have the warm-hearted and diligent help of National Master Bruce Pandolfini in proofreading the text and in helping me rid it of errors concerning the game he plays so enviably well.

This Yeats poem is the novel's epigraph:

The Long-legged Fly

That the topless towers be burnt
And men recall that face,
Move gently if move you must
In this lonely place.
She thinks, part woman, three parts a child,
That nobody looks; her feet
Practice a tinker shuffle
Picked up on the street.
Like a long-legged fly upon the stream
Her mind moves upon silence.

This poem highlights one of the novel's main concerns: the inner workings of genius in a woman. Tevis discusses this concern in his 1983 interview with Don Swain: http://wiredforbooks.org/waltertevis/

Tevis never wrote the sequel he mentions in the interview.