Paul G. Remley author page

As an academic whose advanced studies have been published by Routledge, Cambridge University Press, and others, one might guess that Paul G. Remley would view his youthful output of six daily puzzles for the Times as little more than rite-of-passage juvenilia, along with his early articles for Word Ways and Logophile (articles often addressing palindromes, word squares, and similar concerns).

Indeed, Remley's first two Friday puzzles in the Times came out when he was 19 years old, inaugurating a five-puzzle run that ended abruptly a few months after he had reached the age of 21. In a statement prepared for XWord Info, however, Remley grants that readers who have worked through his more complex academic studies of Old English and Medieval Latin texts "might detect some sort of connection."

Remley cites three major influences on the constructing style that is seen in all of his crosswords: book-length collections by Jack Luzzatto, where that prolific Times stalwart perfected his deployment of "fifteen-letter phraseology and block-corner formalism," collections that Remley "solved from cover to cover"; the innovative and sometimes offbeat content that enhanced early "structuralist monuments by the incomparable Hume R. Craft"; and, above all, the continuing "integration of virtuoso and oblique elements" that would be pushed even farther by future Times crossword editor Will Weng.

Having solved the Times Sunday puzzles continually throughout the later 1960s, both as a preteen and as a teenager, Remley remembers clearly his "palpable sense of joy" when it was announced (in 1969) that Will Weng himself would succeed the iconic Margaret Farrar as editor of the Times puzzle section. Nearly five years passed, however, before Remley would produce work that he felt he could submit to Weng for possible publication.

It is tempting to speculate that Remley's early run broke off (in 1976) as a result of some sort of sour-grapes scenario, when his fifth Weng-edited puzzle came out on a Thursday, and not on a Friday (as had all the rest). As it happened, it was actually at this point that Remley had begun to study Old English, Old Icelandic, and Old Irish in earnest on the Ann Arbor campus of the University of Michigan, along with Greek and Latin. Remley recalls that he was excited to find certain traditionally scholarly areas towards which he could direct some of his more convoluted thought processes, exercises in concentration that been occupied, largely perforce (before Remley's discovery of early-period textual scholarship), by palindromes, anagrams, and crossword puzzles.

In the 1980s, Remley completed Master's-level work in the Department of Anglo-Saxon, Norse, and Celtic, at the University of Cambridge (UK), also minoring in Political Philosophy at Cambridge, and subsequently earning a PhD in New York City, in the Department of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University.

In the course of these studies, a sixth and final puzzle by Remley appeared in the Times, in 1983, once again on a Friday, and there under the editorship of another luminous figure, Eugene T. Maleska.

Since 1988, Paul G. Remley has been a professor in the Department of English at the University of Washington in Seattle, offering more than 35 years of service to the institution. He remains active as a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries (London) and as a Fellow of the International Society for the Study of Medieval Latin (Florence). His marriage to Fiona Robertson Remley now spans four decades of mutual adoration.

With the proliferation of archival digitizations online, Remley concedes his chagrin at the quantity of 1970s linked, popular-culture references that come up with a free search of his name, which include sound-recording efforts for rock bands in the Detroit area (in close orbit with members of the now-canonical Stooges and MC5), as well as guest-stints as a DJ on college-radio shows in Ann Arbor. "In any case," Remley concludes in his statement for XWord Info, "I guess the energy had to come from somewhere."