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.”
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Lucy Sante, author of Nineteen Reservoirs