It’s the birthday of author and professor Frank Brady (b. 1934), who numbers among the biographies he has written one of the bestselling chess books of all time, Profile of a Prodigy: The Life and Games of Bobby Fischer (1965). Brady, a one-time friend of Fischer’s, followed this up with a 2011 biography, Endgame: Bobby Fischer’s Remarkable Rise and Fall—from America’s Brightest Prodigy to the Edge of Madness.

(And this week’s Almanac Award for Nonfiction Work with the Longest Subtitle: Because Why Read the Whole Book When You Can Just Read the Subtitle goes to….(drumroll)…Endgame.)

Brady was born in Brooklyn, New York, and grew up in Woodhaven, New York, where he spent as many as six days a week reading in the local Carnegie library; he credits this library with making him a writer. He did his undergrad work at SUNY, got an M.F.A. from Columbia in film, and an M.A. and Ph.D. from New York University in writing.

Brady spent a lot of time playing chess growing up and met Fischer—who as a child had an IQ of 180—for the first time when they played in the same chess tournament. Today Brady is an International Arbiter, meaning he gets to be boss at Big Important Chess Tournaments, and in fact was arbiter at the famous U.S. championship in 1963 when Fischer played 11-0. In 1960, Brady was the founding editor of the magazine Chess Life, and in 2007, he became president of the prestigious Marshall Chess Club, which, if you play chess seriously, might mean something to you.

Brady is also a professor of communication arts and journalism at St. John’s University, New York. He has also written biographies on Hugh Hefner (ew—that’s an observation, not a judgment), Aristotle Onassis, Barbra Streisand, Orson Welles, and publisher and newspaperman Paul Block. (Super fun Friday fact: Barbra Streisand went to the same high school as Bobby Fisher and had a little crush on him. Just imagine how that could have played out. Would she have curtailed her career as one of entertainment’s most powerful moguls to manage her husband’s chess career? Would he have dodged a life of reclusive bitterness and anti-Semitism to become a doting father to their superbaby? We’ll never know.)

Have a mellow, warmish Friday, read something uplifting this weekend, and stay scrupulously honest to the data.