Elizabeth Kingsley

Elizabeth S. Kingsley (nΓ©e Seelman) (1871-June 8, 1957) was an American puzzle constructor, famous as the inventor of the double-crostic.

Kingsley was born in Brooklyn[1] and attended Wellesley College (Class of 1898).[2] While she was working as a teacher in Brooklyn in 1933, she created the double-crostic, a form of acrostic puzzle that includes features of a crossword puzzle,[3] and eventually sold it to the Saturday Review. Michelle Arnot describes how she invented it, after a Wellesley reunion at which she "despaired that students embraced twentieth-century scribblers like James Joyce":

Tailoring a crossword grid, she stretched its boundaries to create a rectangle. Taking an excerpt from a favorite author, she filled in the grid reading left to right only; words were separated by black squares and continued below and to the left when necessary. Each blank square was assigned a number from 1, at the top left, to 178, at the bottom right corner. Her first selection was six lines from the poem β€œUlysses” by Alfred, Lord Tennyson... Spelling out the poem in anagram tiles, she threw all 178 letters into a pot. From this alphabet soup she pulled out eighteen letters for the poet's name and seven for his work, which she set down in a column. In the style of an acrostic puzzle, these four words provided the first letters for a system of twenty-five anagrams. ... Six months of nonstop production yielded a manuscript of a hundred double crostic puzzles. In March 1934, Kingsley left the pages at the offices of The Saturday Review of Literature... On a Tuesday, the contract was signed; and soon after, Kingsley set up shop at the Henry Hudson Hotel, where she personally crafted a weekly puzzle from her home office. Simon & Schuster gave her a series, and she introduced an acrostic feature for the Sunday Times puzzle page.[4]

The first puzzle was published on March 31, 1934; she wrote puzzles for the New York Times between May 9, 1943 and December 28, 1952.[5] This form of puzzle is still popular today.

References

  1. ↑ "Kingsley, Elizabeth (1871–1957)," Dictionary of Women Worldwide: 25,000 Women Through the Ages.
  2. ↑ Wellesley Alumnae Quarterly, Vol. 5, No. (October 1920), p. 40.
  3. ↑ "Acrostic", Encyclopaedia Britannica
  4. ↑ Michelle Arnot, Four-Letter Words: And Other Secrets of a Crossword Insider (Penguin, 2008: ISBN 0399534350), pp. 152ff.
  5. ↑ History of the NYT Acrostic
This article is issued from Wikipedia - version of the Monday, October 20, 2014. The text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution/Share Alike but additional terms may apply for the media files.