The Boy Genius

Finding Him Again Through the Patriarchal Group
by Anthony Esolen

Lately I have made a hobby of going to a certain very fine and utterly unpolitical website, to see how great chess games were once played, and to learn about the lives and the habits of the game's most illustrious masters. That means I have come into contact with quite a few boy geniuses, as they used to be called. You may recognize their names: Bobby Fischer, Jose Raul Capablanca, Mikhail Tal, and my favorite among them, the nineteenth-century American lad, Paul Morphy.

One of the best players of his day said that losing to Paul Morphy for the first time . . .

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Anthony Esolen is a professor at Magdalen College of the Liberal Arts in Warner, New Hampshire, and the author of many books, including Life Under Compulsion (ISI Books), Real Music: A Guide to the Timeless Hymns of the Church (Tan, with a CD), Out of the Ashes: Rebuilding American Culture (Regnery), and The Hundredfold: Songs for the Lord (Ignatius Press, 2019). He has also translated Dante's Divine Comedy (Random House). He is a senior editor of Touchstone.

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