Raymond J. Smith

Raymond Joseph Smith (12 March 1930–18 February 2008) was an American educator, author, and book editor. He was for more than 30 years the editor of Ontario Review, a literary magazine, and the Ontario Review Press, a literary book publisher. He was married to the American author Joyce Carol Oates.

Smith was born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. He graduated from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee with a bachelor's degree in English. He received his Ph.D. in English at the University of Wisconsin–Madison in 1960, where he met his future wife, fellow graduate student Joyce Carol Oates.

Smith taught 18th-century English literature at the University of Windsor, Windsor, Ontario and New York University until 1980, when he left teaching for editing and publishing. He and Oates co-founded The Ontario Review, a literary magazine, in 1974, with Oates serving as associate editor.] The magazine’s mission, according to Smith, was to bridge the literary and artistic culture of the U.S. and Canada: “We tried to do this by publishing writers and artists from both countries, as well as essays and reviews of an intercultural nature.” In 1980, Oates and Smith co-founded Ontario Review Books, an independent publishing house.

In 2004, Oates described the partnership as "a marriage of like minds—both my husband and I are so interested in literature and we read the same books; he'll be reading a book and then I'll read it—we trade and we talk about our reading at meal times [...] it's a very collaborative and imaginative marriage".

Smith also authored Charles Churchill, a critical study on the 18th-century British satirist and editor of numerous anthologies of works which appeared in Ontario Review.

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