William Gardner Smith
| William Gardner Smith | |
|---|---|
| Born |
February 6, 1927 Philadelphia, Pennsylvania |
| Died | November 5, 1974 (aged 47) Paris, France |
| Occupation | novelist, journalist, essayist |
| Nationality | United States |
| Genre | fiction, non-fiction |
| Notable works | Last of the Conquerors, The Stone Face |
William Gardner Smith (February 6, 1927 – November 5, 1974) was an American journalist, novelist, and editor. Smith is linked to the black social protest novel tradition of the 1940s and the 1950s, a movement that became synonymous with writers such as Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, Willard Motley, and Ann Petry. Smith's third book, South Street (1954), is considered to be one of the first black militant protest novels. His last published novel, The Stone Face (1963), in its account of the Paris massacre of 1961, "stand[s] as one of the few representations of the event available all the way up until the early 1990s".
Smith was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, of African-American descent. After 1951, he maintained an expatriate status in France. However, due to his various journalistic and editorial assignments, he also lived for extended periods of time in Ghana, West Africa. In the final decade of his life, he would travel to the United States to visit family and friends and write about the racial and social upheaval that was occurring there.
Some of Smith's journalism and reportage from this period was published in various media outlets in France and Europe. Some of it was revised, re-adapted, and published in Return To Black America in 1970. Smith, who spoke fluent French, was a frequent contributor and guest on radio and television programs in France, where he was considered an expert on the political struggle, civil unrest, and racial tension occurring in the United States during the turbulent decade of the late 1960s and early 1970s.
Smith was diagnosed with cancer in October 1973 and died just over a year later in Thiais, a commune in the southern suburbs of Paris, France.
Smith was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, to Edith Smith. In 1934 his mother married Douglass Stanley Earle. According to the Dictionary of Literary Biography (DLB):
this marriage produced three children—two daughters, Phyllis and Sydney, and a son, Douglass. Smith, the eldest, delighted in the care of his half sisters and brother, although he disliked his stepfather [...] Living in the South Philadelphia ghetto during the 1940s, a recurring setting in his novels, Smith gained an acute sense of the pain of being black in America.
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