The New York Times published its first crossword puzzle on February 15, 1942, marking a significant shift for a newspaper that had long resisted the popular word game. Prior to this, while many American papers embraced crosswords, The Times had dismissed them as a “primitive sort of mental exercise” and a frivolous diversion, expressing skepticism in print as early as 1924.
The decision to introduce the crossword came shortly after the attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, when the nation faced a grim wartime reality. The Times’s Sunday editor, Lester Markel, advocated for the puzzle’s inclusion as a needed form of relaxation during potentially difficult blackout hours. In a memo dated December 18, 1941, Markel urged publisher Arthur Hays Sulzberger to move forward with the feature, suggesting readers deserved a distraction amid growing anxieties.
Supporting the move was Margaret Petherbridge Farrar, the paper’s pioneering crossword editor, who had helped elevate the puzzle from a dismissed novelty to a widely embraced pastime. Farrar argued that puzzles offered a temporary escape from everyday concerns, writing that “you can’t think of your troubles while solving a crossword.”
The modern crossword puzzle was first created by Arthur Wynne of The New York World in 1913, initially called a “Word-Cross.” In 1921, Farrar—then the editor in chief’s secretary—was assigned to assist Wynne. Although she initially regarded crosswords as a minor annoyance relegated to the margins of the newspaper, Farrar soon developed a deep passion for them.
Crosswords quickly gained popularity in the United States during the 1920s. A 1924 book of puzzles edited by Farrar and others sold 350,000 copies in its first year, signaling widespread enthusiasm. The rising demand for cruciverbalist entertainment drove the eventual acceptance of the puzzle by The New York Times.
When The Times finally embraced the crossword, Margaret Farrar was the natural choice to lead the feature. Over her 26-year tenure as the paper’s founding crossword puzzle editor, she established foundational principles for constructing puzzles, including requiring that all letters intersect another, avoiding repeated words, and maintaining rotational symmetry in the grid—rules that are occasionally relaxed for special editions.
The first Times crossword, created by Charles Erlenkotter, was titled “Headlines and Footnotes” and incorporated a variety of themes, from trivia about current events to Shakespearean quotations and classical mythology, with notable references to the wartime context.
Throughout her career, Farrar earned recognition as the “grand dame of the American crossword puzzle.” Besides her editorial work, she occasionally composed puzzles under the pseudonym Anna Gram. Even after retiring from The Times, she remained active in the crossword community, working on her 134th puzzle book at the time of her death in 1984.