Smith, William Gardner (1927–1974)
Journalist, novelist, and expatriate William Gard-
ner Smith was born and raised in south Philadel-
phia. He attended the mostly white Barratt Junior
High School and graduated from Benjamin Frank-
lin High School, where he was editor of the school
newspaper. He began his career as a writer at age
18 with the Pittsburgh Courier. After being drafted
into the U.S. Army in 1946, he served eight months
in Berlin, Germany, as a clerk typist. Upon return-
ing to the United States, Smith, who had refused
scholarships to both Howard and Lincoln Universi-
ties, historically black universities, briefly attended
Temple University with his new wife, Mary Sewell
Smith. In 1951, perhaps desirous of escaping the
bourgeois life he had inherited with his marriage,
he returned to Europe to live in Paris, like RICHARD
WRIGHT, FRANK YERBY, and CHESTER HIMES.
Despite his primarily northern and urban ex-
perience, Smith became an adult in a segregated
America, unable to escape ubiquitous racism. He
came to know, during his youth in “the city of broth-
erly love,” what James Baldwin calls attention to in
“Notes of a Native Son”: Racism was as present “up
South” in New Jersey as it was “down South” in Mis-
sissippi. While stationed in Europe during World
War II, however, Smith found what he thought was
a greater sense of acceptance, respect, and freedom;
these, along with his familiarity with and love of
French culture, his appreciation of the works of the
French realists from Balzac to Zola, and the impact
he saw Wright having on the intellectual and artistic
communities in France, became central factors in
his decision to return to Europe to live.
Smith’s published work is almost entirely auto-
biographical; like him, his central characters search
for wholeness and meaning in a world that is not
polluted by racial or ethnic domination and ha-
tred. Smith published four novels between 1947
and 1963. At age 21, he published his first novel,
Last of the Conquerors (1947). Set in Germany, Last
of the Conquerors thematically celebrates, through
interracial love, the freedom black soldiers enjoyed
outside the United States, the country whose ideals
they had gone to Germany to uphold and defend
with their lives if necessary. Last of the Conquerors
was followed by Anger and Innocence (1950), a novel
in which the main characters, like the characters in
Wright’s Savage Holiday (1954) and Himes’s Cast
the First Stone (1952), are white. It was translated
into French. South Street (1954), Smith’s third novel,
treats life in south Philadelphia and the racial issues
blacks encountered there. Michel Fabre calls South
Street “an angry book” (243). Smith’s fourth novel,
The STONE FACE (1963), widely considered his best,
is about the new “lost generation” that meandered
in Paris after World War II, four decades after Ger-
trude Stein coined the label to identify post–World
War I American writers, including Ernest Heming-
way, whom Smith admired.
Smith emphasized race and racial issues, but
unlike his contemporary Richard Wright, he had
no desire to use his work as a political tool. He re-
mained committed to aesthetics. He wrote, “I don’t
want to write out of anger. I don’t want a book to
be a cry of anguish. I want it to shed light [that] will
come from the friction of the characters... and the
characters will be part of me” (Fabre, 244).
Although the prestigious Club Français du
Livre recognized Anger and Innocence, Smith re-
mained in the shadow of Wright, who, during his
sojourn in Paris, received all the attention. Fabre
claims that “The Stone Face never really attracted
the attention it deserved” (245) because it was
published in 1963, when attention had switched
from the French Algerian War to the CIVIL RIGHTS
MOVEMENT in America. Smith returned to Amer-
ica in 1967 to cover the extant race riots for the
Agence France Presse. He later worked in Accra,
Ghana, with MAYA ANGELOU, at the invitation of
Shirley Graham DuBois, as the assistant editor-in-
chief of the Ghana Television Network, the direc-
tor of the School of Journalism, and the developer
of the African News Service.
Following his divorce from his African-Ameri-
can wife, who returned to America to live, Smith
married Solange, a Frenchwoman, and fathered
two children. This marriage would also end in di-
vorce before his death from cancer in 1974.BIBLIOGRAPHY
Baldwin, James. “Notes of a Native Son.” In Notes of A
Native Son [1955], 85–114. Boston: Beacon Press,
1990.Smith, William Gardner 469