The Rural We: Michelle Arnot
The Sandisfield resident is a crossword puzzle guru.
Michelle Arnot speaks at the 2013 American Crossword Puzzle Tournament.
“I made my hobby into a career,” says Sandisfield, Mass. resident Michelle Arnot. Her hobby? Crossword puzzles. In fact, she was still in grad school when she began her career as a professional puzzle constructor. She then went on to become an author and historian on the subject. Arnot is the author of Crossword Puzzles for Dummies, What's Gnu? A History of the Crossword, and Four-Letter Words: Secrets of a Crossword Insider, which is now available on Kindle.
My husband and I have been in Sandisfield since 1980, but became full timers last year.
I was a grad student in the French department at Columbia University when I submitted a crossword to Eugene Maleska, editor at The New York Times. When it was published, I shared it with my classmates and discovered that Prof. Eugene Sheffer (also in the French department) was a puzzle constructor for King Features Syndicate and needed an assistant. I became his ghost writer. He regaled me with stories about the birth of the crossword in 1913, in which he played a role. I left academia and then wrote What's Gnu A History of the Crossword for Vintage/Random House and gave up my puzzle-constructing career, first to become publisher of the Herald Tribune Crossword group and later as publisher of Kappa Puzzle Group, which published 100 puzzle magazines. Back before the internet, people bought magazines with puzzles.
In 1990 I taught a course on puzzle solving at the New School for Social Research in NYC. The curriculum became the material for Crossword Puzzles for Dummies, which was published in 1998. My last book, Four Letter Words: Secrets of a Crossword Insider, is about the special language of crosswords. It has just been released as a Kindle Edition.
I haven’t actually written a crossword puzzle since 1982, but I still solve them. Norman Mailer once said that he does a crossword puzzle every day to comb his brain. I do one every day to comb my brain, too. I also compulsively play Words With Friends.
Until COVID, I served as an official at the annual American Crosword Puzzle Tournament, organized by Will Shortz, the NPR puzzle master and editor of The New York Times crosswords. (He and I started at the newspaper at the same time). In 2013 I gave a big speech at the Tournament because I’m the crossword historian.
My parents never looked at a crossword puzzle. But apparently my grandfather was around when puzzles began, and he was a puzzle solver. I never met him, but I guess I inherited the puzzle gene.
