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Cosmic Scholar: The Life and Times of Harry Smith Audiobook
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Grammy Award-winning music scholar and celebrated biographer John Szwed presents the first biography of Harry Smith, the brilliant eccentric who transformed twentieth-century art and culture.
He was an anthropologist, filmmaker, painter, folklorist, mystic, and walking encyclopedia. He taught Patti Smith and Robert Mapplethorpe about the occult, swapped drugs with Timothy Leary, sat at the piano with Thelonious Monk, lived with (and tortured) Allen Ginsberg, argued film with Susan Sontag, and received one of the first Guggenheim grants.
He was always broke, always intoxicated, compulsively irascible, and unimpeachably authentic. Harry Smith was, in the words of Robert Frank, “the only person I met in my life that transcended everything.”
In Cosmic Scholar, John Szwed patches together, for the first time, the life of one of the twentieth century’s most overlooked cultural figures. From his time recording the customs of Native American tribes in the Pacific Northwest and Florida to living in Greenwich Village in its heyday, Smith was consumed by an unceasing desire to create a unified theory of culture.
He was an insatiable creator and collector, responsible for the influential Anthology of American Folk Music and several pioneering experimental films but was also an insufferable and destructive eccentric who was unable to survive in regular society or to keep himself healthy or sober. He was “so devious,” said Ginsberg, and “so saintly.”
Exhaustively researched, energetically told, Cosmic Scholar is a feat of biographical restoration and the long overdue deification of an American icon.
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“Harry Smith was a mythic figure in plain sight…John Szwed’s dedicated and hard-nosed biography gathers all the evidence, weighs it judiciously, and delivers a nuanced portrait of the mass of contradictions that was Harry.”
— Lucy Sante, author of Nineteen Reservoirs
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“Masterfully puts [Smith’s] puzzle of a life together…A revelatory portrait of a unique pop-culture figure.”
— Kirkus Reviews
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About John Szwed
John Szwed is a professor of music and the director of the Center for Jazz Studies at Columbia University. As a jazz musician, he played professionally for more than a decade. He is the author of over fifteen books, including So What: The Life of Miles Davis, Space Is the Place: The Lives and Times of Sun Ra, and Alan Lomax: The Man Who Recorded the World.
About Paul Woodson
Paul Woodson has won SOVAS & Earphones awards, and has recorded close to 350 audiobooks in many different genres—including romance, fiction, history, biography, and mystery—in American and British accents—and received his BFA in acting at Boston University. In his theater days, he worked in many NYC shows, toured the USA and Europe, and starred in NYC as Vincent van Gogh in the sung-through, OOBR Award–winning musical Vincent. He enjoys backpacking the Appalachian Trail and visiting national parks in his spare time. He is a member of SAG-AFTRA.