One of the most enduring fads to emerge from the 1920s—a decade remembered as a time of rebellion, fun, and frivolity—was the crossword puzzle. A crossword puzzle is a grid of numbered squares. Accompanying the grid is a list of clues numbered to correspond to the squares. Puzzlers solve the clues to find words whose letters interlock when they are correctly filled in the blank squares.

Word games have been a feature of many cultures with written languages. Some forms of crossword puzzles have been found on ancient tombs in Egypt, on four-thousand-year-old stone carvings in Crete, and on Chinese antiques. The birth of the modern crossword puzzle, however, is more recent and precise: December 21, 1913. On that Sunday, the New York World newspaper published a word puzzle that had been designed by Arthur Wynne (1862–1945), a journalist from Liverpool, England. Wynne's puzzle, which he called...