Paul Morphy

Paul Morphy was the first great American chess master, a New Orleans prodigy widely seen as the unofficial world's best player at the height of his brief career. Born in 1837, he won the First American Chess Congress in 1857 at age twenty, then sailed to Europe in 1858 and crushed the continent's leading masters, including Adolf Anderssen.

Morphy played with a clarity that was decades ahead of his time, mastering rapid piece development and open lines while his rivals still clung to romantic attacking habits. His most famous miniature, the "Opera Game" of 1858, dispatched two amateur opponents in seventeen moves and remains a textbook lesson in development and initiative.

Then he simply stopped. Unable to find serious challengers and increasingly withdrawn, Morphy retired from chess in his early twenties and died in New Orleans in 1884, his short brilliance earning him the lasting epithet "the pride and sorrow of chess."