Author Bio
Betsy Carter is the author of Swim to Me and The Orange Blossom Special. Her memoir, Nothing to Fall Back On, was a national bestseller.
She is a contributing editor for O: The Oprah Magazine and writes for Good Housekeeping, New York, and AARP, among others. Carter formerly served as an editor at Esquire, Newsweek, and Harper's Bazaar, and was the founding editor of New York Woman. She lives in New York City. (From the publisher.)
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Her Own Words: Why I Wrote The Puzzle King
My great uncle invented Monopoly. At least that's what I grew up believing. But then again, I was raised in a family where mythology and truth blurred. My parents were German Jews who narrowly escaped to this country during the War, and in the re-building of their lives as Americans, they told their youngest child—me—an edited version of their past.
In hindsight, it is probably why I became a journalist. As a reporter and editor, I spent more than twenty years digging up other people's stories and trying to fit together the pieces of their lives—all the while, ignoring the puzzle of my own life.
After being a reporter for Newsweek, editing six magazines, writing one memoir and two novels, I only recently began looking into my past.
The first thing I discovered was that my great uncle did NOT invent Monopoly. An advertising man, who came from Lithuania to this country as a young boy, during the Depression he figured out how to make jigsaw puzzles out of cardboard and sold them for fifteen cents a week.
The puzzles became a sensation. Time magazine dubbed him "America's Puzzle King," and he made millions. He was married to a beautiful woman, a German Jew, who had come to America as a young girl and was my mother's aunt.
What else didn't I know?
The more I dug, the more I learned about the heroic efforts of the people who helped my parents escape Germany.
My novel, The Puzzle King, is based on these truths. All of that family is gone now, which is why I chose to tell their story as fiction. My novel takes place between 1892 and 1936 and goes back and forth between New York and a small town in Germany. We see the burgeoning anti-Semitism on both sides of the ocean, and the intransigence of German Jews who refused to comprehend what was happening to them.
Dire times make for unlikely heroes. The Puzzle King is about how one person saved hundreds of lives assuring a future for them and the children who came after them. I am one of those children. (From the author.)