Book Cover
 

Natan Last teaches

The Art of the Crossword

4 online sessions beginning Tuesday, April 29 at 7pm EST

The crossword puzzle is a curious object, a frivolous game that’s nevertheless shaped like intellectual labor. The crossword, though ephemeral, helps canonize what is and isn't considered "common knowledge." The puzzle's initial popularity in the 1920's coincided with the dawn of modernism — writers like Gertrude Stein and T.S. Eliot were tarred as members of a “crossword puzzle school” of literature. And the puzzle has always comforted us in moments of crisis. Invented on the eve of World War I, adopted by the New York Times during World War II, and made even more popular during the COVID pandemic, the crossword puzzle has never felt so relevant.

This class has three goals: (1) to trace the history of the crossword, from the hand-inked diversion of the 1910s to the digital games powerhouse of today; (2) to show where that history intersects with literature; and (3) to demonstrate how a crossword puzzle actually gets made. At the end of the class, we will have constructed a crossword together.
 
Each class session will be 90 minutes. 
 
Please email events@mcnallyjackson.com with any questions. 

Natan Last is a writer, researcher, and policy advocate in New York. He regularly contributes crosswords to the New Yorker, the New York Times, and Hyperallergic, and was once the youngest person to publish a Sunday puzzle in the Times magazine. His essays and poetry have appeared in the New Yorker, the Times, The Drift, The Atlantic, Narrative, and elsewhere. His nonfiction book on the past and present of crosswords is forthcoming this year from Pantheon. 

Price: $220.00
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