Scott Smith (author)

Scott Bechtel Smith (born July 13, 1965) is an American author and screenwriter, who has published two novels, A Simple Plan and The Ruins. His screen adaptation of A Simple Plan earned him an Academy Award nomination. The screenplay won a Broadcast Film Critics Association Award and a National Board of Review Award.

Smith was born in Summit, New Jersey in 1965 and moved to Toledo, Ohio as a child. After graduating from Dartmouth College and from Columbia University with a Master of Fine Arts degree in Writing, he took up writing full-time.

His second novel, The Ruins, was also adapted into a film, released on April 4, 2008. Stephen King called it "[t]he best horror novel of the new century." King had also called A Simple Plan "simply the best suspense novel of the year."

In 2016 it was announced that TNT had greenlit a pilot for "Civil", a new TV series created by Smith about a second American Civil War following a hotly contested presidential election.

Smith is the son of Linda and Doug Smith. He told The Pittsburgh Tribune-Review reviewer Regis Behe that, as a child, he read his father's "castoffs," the novels of Clive Cussler and Jack Higgins. "Growing up, I also read Ray Bradbury and Stephen King," he said. "I just had a sense of how to create these places that aren't real world places, but just with this provisional attachment to the real world. It is very much of your imagination, and I felt very much I could do that."

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