Talk:Arthur Wynne

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Wynne, Arthur (1871–1945), crossword puzzle deviser, was born on 16 May 1871 at 2 Everton Village, Everton, Liverpool, the son of George Wynne, editor of the Liverpool Courier, and his wife, Delicia Eliza Ann Sheldon. He had one brother and one sister. As a young man Wynne emigrated to the United States in the mid-1890s and, according to his family tradition, he first worked for an onion farmer in Texas. He soon, however, like his father, became a newspaperman, with his first job as a society editor of a paper in east Liverpool, Ohio. He then gravitated to Pennsylvania, where he was appointed sports editor of the local newspaper at McKeesport. His versatility was demonstrated when he was appointed as the music editor and critic of the Pittsburgh Despatch. He even played second violin in the Pittsburgh Philharmonic Orchestra. Wynne's two passions in life had always been music and puzzles. He was able to fulfil this latter calling when he accepted the editorship of the fun section of the Sunday newspaper New York World. It was on 21 December 1913, when he was pressed to fill a space on a page that printers were in a hurry to lock up, that he thought of using the space to revive the acrostic word game which dated from at least Roman times. He constructed a hollow, diamond-shaped grid of interlocking words and dubbed his creation a ‘word-cross’. It was clear from the start, from the volume of letters sent in by readers, that Wynne's word-crosses were popular. However it was not for ten years—until two young, would-be publishers, M. Lincoln Schuster and R. L. Simon, brought out the first ever crossword puzzle book—that a national fad was clearly in the making. Simon and Schuster had sought out Wynne's successor, Margaret Petheridge, and sold more than 2 million copies in the first twenty-four months. The crossword puzzle craze spread to Britain when the London Sunday Express began publishing puzzles on 2 November 1924. The newspaper established that during the war years, with its long hours in air-raid shelters, barracks, and mess decks, one in twenty-five of the population did a crossword every day. Latterly Wynne became an employee of King Features Syndicate. He did not directly benefit from the many newspapers who used the syndication service. He had never attempted to patent the concept which brought so much pleasure and frustration to so many. He was a contemplative man, with a wide circle of friends. He married twice, first Thelma Sacensen and then Lillian Webb. There was a daughter from the first marriage, and a son and a daughter by the second. He died at the Morton Plant Hospital, Clearwater, Florida, on 14 January 1945. Norris McWhirter Sources: ‘Crossword puzzle’, The new encyclopaedia Britannica, 15th edn (1997) · D. D. Millikin, ‘Crossword puzzle’, Collier's encyclopedia, 7 (1991), 502–3 · R. Millington, The strange world of the crossword (1974) · b. cert. Norris McWhirter, ‘Wynne, Arthur (1871–1945)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004 62.64.206.108 (talk)

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