Or is it? I spent five years researching the game’s history for my new book, The Monopolists: Obsession, Fury, and the Scandal Behind the World’s Favorite Board Game, and found that Monopoly’s story began decades earlier, with an all-but-forgotten woman named Lizzie Magie, an artist, writer, feminist and inventor. He called the game Monopoly, and when he sold it to Parker Brothers he became fantastically rich-an inspiring Horatio Alger tale of homegrown innovation if ever there was one. In the 1930s, at the height of the Great Depression, a down-on-his-luck family man named Charles Darrow invented a game to entertain his friends and loved ones, using an oilcloth as a playing surface. Some of the game’s early tokens doubled as prizes in Cracker Jack boxes.
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