The Monopolists by Mary Pilon

Description

The bitter battle behind the world’s most famous board game. The Monopolists: Obsession, Fury, and the Scandal Behind the World’s Favorite Board Game — Mary Pilon’s gripping investigation — reveals the true history of Monopoly: not Charles Darrow’s Depression-era invention myth, but Lizzie Magie’s 1904 Landlord’s Game, created deliberately to warn against the evils of monopolies.

Pilon unravels decades of corporate myth-making: how Parker Brothers bought up competing patents, buried Magie’s credit, and sold the rags-to-riches Darrow story to the world — until a landmark 1970s lawsuit dragged the truth into open court. It is a parable of how history gets written by the winners, even — especially — in board games, and of how one woman’s warning about greed became greed’s favorite pastime.

Fascinating and quietly infuriating, this is essential for game lovers and business-history readers — you’ll never pass Go the same way again, and you’ll never trust a corporate origin story quite so easily either.

Few board games are as beloved — or as misunderstood — as Monopoly. In The Monopolists, award-winning journalist Mary Pilon uncovers the obsession, fury, and scandal behind the world’s favorite board game, and the woman history nearly forgot.

Long before Charles Darrow sold his “invention” to Parker Brothers during the Great Depression, a feminist named Lizzie Magie created The Landlord’s Game, patented in 1904, to teach the dangers of unchecked capitalism. Darrow learned the game from friends in Atlantic City, claimed it as his own, and became a millionaire — while Parker Brothers quietly bought up Magie’s original patent to bury the competing claim.

The truth might never have surfaced if not for Ralph Anspach, an economics professor whose Anti-Monopoly game drew a lawsuit from Parker Brothers and triggered a decade-long legal battle that finally dragged the real history into the light.

Pilon — drawing on court documents, interviews, and her reporting for The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal — tells a gripping story of creativity, corporate power, and the fight for credit. A must-read for game lovers, history buffs, and anyone fascinated by how legends are made, this ebook reveals that the most ruthless game of all was played off the board.