About Word Freak

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When I entered the small, hidden subculture of competitive Scrabble in 1997, I knew a few things. I knew, thanks mostly to a memorable Sports Illustrated feature story by S.L. Price a couple of years earlier, that it existed. I knew that I was susceptible to the hypnotic sway of the game and of language; my childhood pal Andy and I still talked about my brash, shockingly acceptable play of ACADEMES back in high school, and I had played casually ever since. And I knew I was genetically predisposed to Scrabble’s linguistic, mathematical and strategic charms; in his 20s, my brother spent countless hours memorizing the Official Scrabble Players Dictionary in order to outplay his roommate in their running penny-a-point games.

The Author, Christmas 1975

But even as I fell into the abyss of Scrabble—studying lists of “letter combinations” in probability order; playing games alone at home, on Thursday nights at the Manhattan Scrabble club, with the gritty “parkies” in Washington Square Park; traveling to weekends tournaments desperately seeking a higher “rating”—I wasn’t convinced a book about this world would find an audience. It was Scrabble, after all, which in the popular imagination was an unhip board game that languished on dusty shelves. My hope was that closeted Scrabble players and fanatic New York Times crossword solvers and Jumble doers and people who like to read about exotic subcultures would be interested in the strange place on which I, inevitably it seems now, had landed. But I wasn’t sure they would, and was too deeply involved in “reporting” to care.

The book that emerged from more than three years of nonstop Scrabbling tells the story of this classic American game, the power of language, my personal quest for experthood and more. My guides, mentors and friends play prominent roles in the narrative: G.I. Joel Sherman, a jobless, gastrointestinally challenged, fulltime Scrabble player; Marlon Hill, an anagramming Malcolm X ; Matt Graham, a pill-popping stand-up comic; Joe Edley, a nonconfrontational human-potential devotee who nonetheless irritates fellow players in his dual role as champion player and National Scrabble Association executive; Lester Schonbrun, an armchair Communist who began playing in the early 1960s. But the game itself, invented by unemployed architect Alfred Butts in a walkup apartment in Queens in during the Depression, is the real star, its powerful grip over a few lives a stand-in for our innate human desire for order, logic, challenge, immersion, obsession and escape.

Word Freak spent a dozen weeks on the New York Times extended bestseller list, and was a Times business bestseller and a Times Notable Book of 2001 and 2002. It was named the No. 2 nonfiction book of 2001 by Entertainment Weekly, and made the bestseller lists of the Washington Post, San Francisco Chronicle, Los Angeles Times and the American Booksellers Association. Word Freak was optioned by Academy Award-winning director Curtis Hanson, spawned several documentary films and helped prompt the first-ever television coverage of tournament Scrabble, on ESPN. Word Freak is in a 12th printing in paperback. It’s been translated into Greek under the title Lexomanis.