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Margaret Farrar was born in New York City (1897). She graduated from Smith College in 1919, spent a year as a secretary in a bank, and then got a position with the New York World. She found herself in charge of the weekly crossword puzzle, a Sunday feature the World had pioneered in 1913. By the time she started work there, crossword puzzles were becoming popular in America, and within a couple of years they were a national craze. Farrar joined two others in editing the Cross Word Puzzle Book (1924), the first such book ever published. It seemed like such a gamble at the time that the publisher, Simon & Schuster, issued it under another imprint. It was a huge success, selling nearly 400,000 copies in its first year. After that, Farrar edited about two crossword puzzle books per year.
Crossword puzzles became a fixture of most major American newspapers, but the New York Times refused to print them for years. Finally, in February 1942, under Farrar's editorship, the Sunday edition of the Times began printing a crossword puzzle, and in September 1950 it became a daily feature. Farrar remained at the Times, also editing eighteen collections of Times crossword puzzles, until her retirement in December 1968. She died in New York City on June 11, 1984, while working on her 134th book of crossword puzzles. |
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