City Lights and Farrar, Straus, Giroux celebrate the publication of
Cosmic Scholar: The Life and Times of Harry Smith
by John Szwed
published by Farrar, Straus, Giroux
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 keep himself healthy or sober. He was “so devious,” said Ginsberg, and “so saintly.”
Exhaustively researched, energetically told, and complete with a trove of images, Cosmic Scholar is a feat of biographical restoration and the long overdue deification of an American icon.
John Szwed is the author or editor of many books, including biographies of Billie Holiday, Miles Davis, Sun Ra, and Alan Lomax. He has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the Rockefeller Foundation, and in 2005 was awarded a Grammy for Doctor Jazz, a book included with the album Jelly Roll Morton: The Complete Library of Congress Recordings by Alan Lomax. A former Professor of Anthropology, African American Studies, and Film Studies for 26 years at Yale University, he was also a Professor of Music and Jazz Studies at Columbia University, and served as the Chair of the Department of Folklore and Folklife at the University of Pennsylvania. He lives in Philadelphia with his family.
Critical praise for Cosmic Scholar
“Szwed, piece by obscure piece, masterfully puts [Harry Smith’s] puzzle of a life together . . . A revelatory portrait of a unique pop-culture figure.” —Kirkus Reviews
“Harry Smith was a mythic figure in plain sight, a twentieth-century counterpart to Athanasius Kircher or John Dee, and he always seemed more legend than fact, even in his lifetime–even in the same room. 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
“Harry Smith was one of those underground geniuses who truly was a genius, a maddening, willful, unkempt scrounger of immense intellect whose greatest achievement inflected modern culture and who achieved much more besides. Smith’s mercurial life should have defied any biographer, yet John Szwed, amazingly, has pulled it off, with discrimination as well as sympathy.” —Sean Wilentz, author of Bob Dylan in America
“With quirky brilliance fitting the subject, John Szwed shows how Harry Smith was much more than a bohemian caricature. He was an early master of creative curation and a pre-digital influencer: a profound influence on people who influenced people we recognize as profoundly influential.” —David Hajdu, author of Love For Sale: Pop Music in America
“Best-known for his labor-intensive experimental films and indispensable Anthology of American Folk Music, Harry Smith was an impoverished polymath, multiculti practically from birth – because he cherished repressed realities – and too spiky to fit even a slot in the counter-culture. Yet Harry Smith influenced the influencers. Now thanks to John Szwed and his crackerjack research, this visionary is no longer a complete enigma.” —Cynthia Carr, author of Fire in the Belly: The Life and Times of David Wojnarowicz
“Harry Smith did more than compile the world’s most influential mixtape; he was a polymath creator, scholar, anthropologist, film maker and premier-league New York City art scene hustler. John Szwed’s an anthropologist, too, but also a mystery writer, drawn to figures like Smith and Sun Ra in part for their spectacular unknowability. This biography again transforms facts into magic-laced storytelling — which is what Smith was all about.” —Will Hermes, author of Lou Reed: The King of New York
“A tormented transcontinental seer who lived like a freeloading visitor from another dimension, Harry Smith existed in obscure subcultures but knew every important artist, writer, musician, and filmmaker from the 1930s to the 1980s. John Szwed’s book captures the druggie angel/devil hoarder musicologist/filmmaker at work building a new reality, one we’d inhabit today if we could get to it.” —A. S. Hamrah, author of The Earth Dies Streaming: Film Writing, 2002-2018
Made possible by support from the City Lights Foundation. To learn more visit: https://citylights.com/foundation/
