Writer and immigration policy advocate Natan Last is also a crossword constructor for The New Yorker and, in his book “Across the Universe: The Past, The Present, and Future of the Crossword Puzzle,” looks at the game’s history and effect on culture and politics. We spoke with Last ahead of his event at Harvard Book Store on Dec. 10. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
What inspired you to write this book?
I have been making puzzles since I was in high school, and I’m kind of obsessed with everyone else’s obsessions. In the puzzle world, you have computer scientists who see the puzzle as the next intellectual game that computers will either help make or conquer; I love the sort of tweedy English-major types who love the crossword for its cultural breadth and see the puzzle as kind of a mixtape or recommendation engine; I really love the people who see it as a group of words that appears in a newspaper and that it should be politically inclusive. I just wanted to bring readers into that world, to show them how many different groups of people think the crossword can be this really big and important thing and see themselves reflected in the puzzles that they make and solve.
Was there anything really unexpected that you learned when researching?
I was shocked at how crosswords just kind of crop up in these really important junctures of American history. Crosswords were invented right around World War I, and exploded in popularity when people had leisure time for the first time after World War I. Crosswords were so successful that they kind of helped underwrite big American houses of letters: Random House and Simon & Schuster all kind of owe their reputations and their might to the crosswords. The New York Times resisted adding a crossword – it isn’t until Pearl Harbor that it thinks people are going to need a distraction from the bleak, encroaching war.
What is your primary takeaway for readers from this book?
Crosswords can be an art form, and making them and solving them can be a deep pleasure. And also just that crosswords are really capacious. They unite lots of parts of the brain. Making a grid is pretty math-y, but writing clues, of course, is pretty literary.
What’s the best advice you have for someone who wants to get better at doing crosswords?
One I heard in researching this book is to treat the crossword like a logic puzzle and not a trivia game: Start thinking of the grid in terms of how plurals end in S, and most words in English start with consonants – at the beginning, you’re going to have a lot of consonants. That helps people solve the grid more than they solve the clues. It also helps people kind of work through their shame when they feel like they don’t know something and the puzzle’s kind of shaming them for trivia that they feel if they were as erudite as they should be, they would know. But in fact, most of the words on the grid are things you do know or you’ve seen before, and it’s just the clues being a little sneaky.
Natan Last reads from “Across the Universe: The Past, The Present, and Future of the Crossword Puzzle” at 7 p.m. Dec. 10 at Harvard Book Store, 1256 Massachusetts Ave., Harvard Square, Cambridge. Free.
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