His 2004 puzzle, "Wide Open Spaces", holds the record for the lowest word count (i.e., number of answers) in a Sunday puzzle. A poll of puzzlemakers at, a popular website for crossword constructors, ranked Reagle the most admired by his peers. Games magazine has called Reagle "the best Sunday crossword creator in America". And he's one of the greatest puzzlemakers at interlocking words in intricate, wide-open patterns". The New York Times crossword puzzle editor Will Shortz has said that "his themes are consistently fresher and funnier than anyone else's. Representative puzzles: humor and wide-open grids
Reagle died August 22, 2015, after being hospitalized two days earlier for acute pancreatitis. Merl and Marie made their home in the Tampa Bay, Florida area. With the assistance of his wife, Marie Haley, he published more than 20 volumes of his Sunday crosswords, which he sold from his website. They are reprinted in books that he sold under his own imprint, PuzzleWorks. Reagle was one of the few crossword constructors who made a living solely through puzzlemaking, as he retained all rights to his puzzles. Cash prizes, including a first prize of $25,000, are awarded in two categories, "casual solver" and "puzzle professional". Reagle created the National Brain Game Challenge, an online contest featuring a Sunday crossword that contains a clued secret message. In 2011 Reagle donated his expertise to produce an awareness-building campaign for the Alzheimer's Foundation of America. In the 1990s Reagle was regarded as one of the top producers of a new type of crossword puzzle: "less stodgy and more hip." This trend was encouraged by The New York Times crossword puzzle editor Will Shortz, who sought to appeal to a wider and younger readership with "pop culture references. Three years later, he went into syndication. In 1985 he was contracted to produce a regular Sunday crossword for the San Francisco Examiner 's new Sunday magazine. He regarded crossword-making as more of a hobby, working as a television scriptwriter by day and a film scriptwriter by night. In the early 1980s Reagle began submitting crossword puzzles to Dell crossword magazine, Games magazine, and Margaret Farrar's Simon & Schuster books. He submitted a puzzle to the contest starting in 1980, and later served as a tournament judge and a commentator for the tournament's finals. Reagle first competed in the American Crossword Puzzle Tournament in 1979, its second year, and placed third. He attended the University of Arizona, but dropped out a few credits short of a degree in English. He made his first crossword when he was six years old and sold a puzzle to The New York Times at age 16, a feat that made him the youngest published Times puzzle constructor at the time. Reagle was born in Audubon, New Jersey on January 5, 1950. Reagle also produced a bimonthly crossword puzzle for AARP The Magazine magazine, a monthly crossword puzzle for the Society of Former Special Agents of the FBI, and puzzles for the American Crossword Puzzle Tournament. For 30 years, he constructed a puzzle every Sunday for the San Francisco Chronicle (originally the San Francisco Examiner), which he syndicated to more than 50 Sunday newspapers, including the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, the Philadelphia Inquirer, the Seattle Times, The Plain Dealer ( Cleveland, Ohio), the Hartford Courant, the New York Observer, and the Arizona Daily Star.
Merl Harry Reagle (Janu– August 22, 2015) was an American crossword constructor.
0 kommentar(er)
