Grandmaster Arnold Denker - the Dean of American Chess, U. S. chess champion from 1944 to 1946, was the Runyonesque chronicler of the "guys and dolls" of the New York chess scene of the 1930s, and the man who treated personal friendship as a high art. No one meeting Arnold for the first time, however briefly, could doubt how he played the games of chess and life. You could see it. In his athletic build, in his well-tailored elegance, in how he chomped into one of his favorite, five-inch thick hot pastrami sandwiches at the old Applebaum's on New York's 7th Avenue - or, most impressively, in the way he crossed a street. For Grandmaster Denker did not just cross a street, he attacked it as he would an opponent's king. GM Denker played chess the way he crossed that street. His goal was nearly always to cross the center of the board on the way to his opponent's king. Some of his sorties were wing-and-prayer affairs, and they famously crashed. However, many of his tempestuous attacks, with their slashing assaults against enemy kings, did reach the other side of the board, producing victories and draws against the greatest players of his time.
"Paul Morphy: The Pride and Sorrow of Chess" is the only full-length biography of Paul Morphy, the antebellum chess prodigy who launched United States participation in international chess and is still generally acknowledged as the greatest American chess player of all time. But Morphy was more than a player. He was a shy, retiring lawyer who had been taught that such games were no way to make a living. The strain of his fame and the pull of his domineering family led Morphy to set another precedent: chess madness. Morphy's mental descent after retiring from chess became a part of his lore, made all the more magnanimous by a spate of twentieth-century examples. "The Pride and Sorrow of Chess" tells the full known story of the life of Paul Morphy, from his privileged upbrining in New Orleans to his dominance of the chess world, to the later tragedy of his demise. This new edition of David Lawson's seminal work, still the principal source for all Morphy biographical presentations, also includes new biographical material about the biographer himself, telling the story of the author, his opus, and the previously unknown life that brought him to the research.