keypusher: <jessicafischerqueen> I'm glad you liked the St. Petersburg collection. I sure enjoyed writing it! But it was a lot of work, so it's always nice when people notice it.
Just in case my writeup wasn't clear, I think it's perfectly possible that Pillsbury was suffering from second-stage syphilis at St. Petersburg. But it seems unlikely to me that he caught it there.
I've never read any bio of Pillsbury. I know <Calli> has a collection of press clippings, including a wonderful interview with Pillsbury upon his return from Hastings that probably gives you as much insight into him as any biographer will. I translated Tarrasch's article on Pillsbury's death -- I assume you've seen that. You can also find some contemporaneous stuff at Winter's Chess Notes site. I tend to value contemporary journalism over biography.
Books about Pillsbury were collected by parisattack -- I'm sure you've seen that too.
<parisattack: <bengalcat47: I just recently bought Pope's book on Pillsbury thru Amazon. I highly recommend this book. Many of Pillsbury's games that are not shown here can be found in this book.>I second that motion! Its the best Pillsbury book, definately. Although each of the others does have something going for it:
Pillsbury's Chess Career - Sergeant/Watts
Great American Chess Players - H.N. Pillsbury - Wenman
Pillsbury the Extraordinary - Soltis/Smith
Harry Nelson Pillsbury - A Genius Ahead of His Time - Cherniaev
Supplement with Hasting 1895 tournament Books.>
Here's parisattack on Cherniaev:
<Early short chapters - Biographical Note,A Few Quotes from Pillsbury, The Most Remarkable Simultaneous Player.Major section - Best Games pp 107-206 followed by a fairly comprehensive tournament record w/Crosstables and such. There are 50 Annotated Games with typically 3-5 diagrams the game.
Annotations are generally 'crisp' not a lot of text but some fairly extensive hard analysis and lots of alternative game cites.
Its a good book, worth having, but not a great book. But, as you say, not much on HNP.>
You can probably find excerpts of these books on Google or Amazon and decide if any of them are worth reading. I will gladly second parisattack's endorsement of the Hastings tournament book. It includes a nice short bio of Pillsbury and he annotates many of the games in the book. The book also includes many of his greatest games, of course. The whole thing is available on Google books for free.
Generally speaking, <parisattack> is a wonderfully well-informed reader/collector, so if he praises a book like he does Pope's book on Pillsbury, that goes a long way with me.
IMO, chess biographies (especially old ones) are a waste of time for the most part. Sort of like the capsule bios of old-time baseball players I read when I was a kid -- there was no internet, there was no real interest in getting things right, but there was interest in telling interesting/poignant stories, the facts be damned.
Winkelman's little bio of Rubinstein in the Kmoch book is full of nonsense. I've never read Hannak's bio of Lasker, but the little excerpts I've come across tend to be pretty sloppy (e.g. Pillsbury had "scores" of chances to unleash his novelty between 1896 and 1904, but he saved it until he could spring it on Lasker at Cambridge Springs).
Kibitzing
