But always my use of those devices is based on my research, recollection, and study of the man. To vivify Bobby’s extraordinary life I sometimes use the techniques of the novelist: elaboration of setting, magnification of detail, fragments of dialogue, and revelation of interior states.
I ask forgiveness for my occasional speculations in this book, but Fischer’s motivations beg to be understood and when conjecture is used, I inform the reader of my doing so.
The renowned psychologist Alfred Binet noted that if we could look inside the mind of a chess player we would see there “a whole world of feelings, images, ideas, emotions and passions.” And so it was with Bobby: His head was not merely filled with chess bytes, phantom computer connections on a grid of sixty-four squares, but with poetry and song and lyricism. And though for a period of decades he poured most of his energy and passion into a quest for chess excellence, he was not the idiot savant often portrayed by the press.Īs Virginia Woolf observed in her one attempt at writing a life story, that of artist Roger Fry: “A biography is considered complete if it merely accounts for six or seven selves, whereas a person may well have as many as one thousand.” Many lives, and then second and even third acts, constitute the drama of Bobby Fischer, but my attempt here was to delineate just one of Fischer’s kaleidoscopic personalities-that of a genius, an inwardly tortured warrior-and within that framework to capture his shifting identities and roles. His outrageous pronouncements were filled with cruelty and prejudice and hate. His games were filled with charm and beauty and significance. Bobby was secretive, yet candid generous, yet parsimonious naive, yet well informed cruel, yet kind religious, yet heretical. But a warning to those who turn these pages: Paradoxes abound. Jacket photograph © Stephen Green-Armytage/Sports Illustrated/Getty ImagesĪS SOMEONE WHO knew Bobby Fischer from the time he was quite young, I’ve been asked hundreds of times, “What was Bobby Fischer really like?” This book is an attempt to answer that question. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication DataĮndgame : Bobby Fischer’s remarkable rise and fall-from America’s brightest prodigy to theġ. Published in the United States by Crown Publishers, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.ĬROWN and the Crown colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
Jeremy Silman, author of The Amateur’s Mind This fascinating biography is filled with hope, Cold War intrigue, the fulfillment of genius, and an explosive fall from grace that is both deeply moving and, ultimately, profoundly sad.” Christopher Chabris, coauthor of The Invisible Gorilla
Bobby fischer my 60 memorable games storage locker full#
Frank Brady is the perfect biographer for Bobby Fischer, and Endgame tells the full and fair story of Fischer’s astonishing rise and heartbreaking fall.” “I have been following Bobby Fischer my whole life, but I learned something new on nearly every page of this wonderful book. Michael Weinreb, author of The Kings of New York “A definitive and finely detailed chronicle of one of the most fascinating and eccentric Americans of the twentieth century, written by one of the few men with the expertise, knowledge, and writing ability to pull it off in a manner deserving of the subject.” “The teenage prodigy, the eccentric champion, the irascible anti-Semite, the genius, the pathetic paranoid-these and other Bobby Fischers strut and fret their hour upon celebrity’s stage.… Informed, thorough, sympathetic, and surpassingly sad.” Wayne Coffey, New York Times bestselling author of The Boys of Winter In Endgame, Frank Brady masterfully chronicles the full breadth of Fischer’s life, producing a narrative driven by staggering detail and profound insight into the psyche of a troubled genius.”
“Bobby Fischer began life as a lonely prodigy and ended it as a hate-spewing enigma, and in between became America’s greatest chess player, a man renowned both for his unmatched brilliance and social clumsiness.