The Exploits and Triumphs, in Europe, of Paul Morphy, the Chess Champion

Description

On October 6, 1858, a 21-year-old lawyer from New Orleans stepped off a ship in England and, over the following year, proceeded to defeat nearly every major chess master in Europe. Paul Morphy’s tour has been called the greatest individual sporting achievement of the 19th century — and this book is the account of someone who was there for all of it.

Frederick Milnes Edge served as Morphy’s secretary throughout the tour and wrote this record shortly after it ended. It covers Morphy’s early games and the First American Chess Congress that made his name at home, his voyage to Europe, his sweep through the London chess clubs, his blindfold exhibitions (including one of the most famous simultaneous blindfold displays in chess history), his matches in Paris against Daniel Harrwitz and Adolf Anderssen, and the long-running, unresolved dispute with English champion Howard Staunton that Morphy’s supporters have argued for over 160 years was Staunton’s loss by forfeit.

First published in 1859, this is one of the earliest and most complete firsthand accounts of Morphy’s European campaign, written while the memory of it was still fresh. This edition presents the original 1859 text in full, unabridged.