Mary Pilon is an award-winning reporter at The New York Times where she currently covers sports and the author of The Monopolists, a forthcoming book that tells the scandalous true history of the world’s most famous board game (Bloomsbury, February 2015). From the book’s Amazon page:
Most think [Monopoly] was invented by an unemployed Pennsylvanian who sold his game to Parker Brothers during the Great Depression in 1935 and lived happily–and richly–ever after. That story, however, is not exactly true. Ralph Anspach, a professor fighting to sell his Anti-Monopoly board game decades later, unearthed the real story, which traces back to Abraham Lincoln, the Quakers, and a forgotten feminist named Lizzie Magie who invented her nearly identical Landlord’s Game more than thirty years before Parker Brothers sold their version of Monopoly. Her game–underpinned by morals that were the exact opposite of what Monopoly represents today–was embraced by a constellation of left-wingers from the Progressive Era through the Great Depression, including members of Franklin Roosevelt’s famed Brain Trust.
Mary previously worked as a staff reporter at The Wall Street Journal, where she wrote about various aspects of economics and the financial crisis and has worked at Gawker, USA Today, and New York Magazine. She is an honors graduate of New York University and made the Forbes magazine’s first-ever 30 Under 30 list for media. Her work has been featured in The Best American Sports Writing and garnered awards from the Associated Press Sports Editors, the Gerald Loeb Awards and the Freedom Forum. A native Oregonian and fledgling marathoner, she currently lives in New York City where she enjoys the occasional board game night. Visit her web site at marypilon.com and find her on Twitter @marypilon.
We’re excited that Mary will be joining us at #BullCon this year. To register for the conference, go here.
