Langdon Smith

Langdon Smith (4 January 1858 – 8 April 1908) was an American journalist and writer. His most well-known work is the poem "Evolution", which begins with the line "When you were a tadpole and I was a fish". The line later became the title of an essay about this "one-poem poet" written by Martin Gardner.

Biography According to Lewis Allen Brown's 1909 biographical sketch of Smith,

Langdon Smith was born in Kentucky Jan. 4, 1858 ... In boyhood he served in the Comanche and Apache wars as a trooper, his letters descriptive of these campaigns winning him his first newspaper position. Later he acted as a war correspondent during the extended fighting with the Sioux tribes.

Martin Gardner, who consulted Who's Who In America 1906–07 adds that Smith went to school in Louisville, Kentucky, 1864–1872.

Smith continued reporting for William Randolph Hearst's Journal after the war. He was involved in at least one "scoop" for which Hearst papers became notorious, delivering the first newspaper copy of the 20th century to President McKinley. According to historian W. Joseph Campbell,

"Ten seconds into the century, the first issue of the New York Journal of 1 January 1901 fell from the newspaper's complex of fourteen high-speed presses. The first issue was rushed by automobile across pavements slippery with mud and rain to a waiting express train, reserved especially for the occasion. The newspaper was folded into an engraved silver case and carried aboard by Langdon Smith, a young reporter known for his vivid prose style. At speeds that reached eighty miles an hour, the special train raced through the darkness to Washington, D.C., and Smith's rendezvous with the president, William McKinley."

In the early years of the century he wrote for the New York Evening World as a featured writer, identified by his byline. Judging from the articles he published, he seems to have begun as a featured sports writer, with such articles as "Cock Fight Draws Out Millionaires" Beginning about 1904 his byline begins to appear frequently in the Sunday World and Sunday World Magazine on investigative articles such as "New York's Smiling Army of Factory Girls", "A Night With a Tenderloin 'Cop'", "A Day in the Hotel Astor Kitchen".

Although Smith's most famous work is the poem "Evolution", according to Brown, Smith also wrote short stories, and a novel, On the Pan Handle, that were well received at the time. "Bessie McCall" was mentioned in an article on Smith in The New York American of April 21, 1939 by one Hype Igoe. The building that had housed "McGurk's Suicide Hall" was not demolished until 2005. The complete text of "Bessie McCall" is available on WikiSource.

The first few stanzas of the poem "Evolution" were written and published in the New York Herald in 1895. It was worked upon for many years and later published in full in the New York Journal sometime before 1906, and posthumously published in illustrated and annotated book form as Evolution : A Fantasy (1909).

Death and wife's suicide Smith died at his home, 148 Midwood Street, Flatbush, New York on 8 April 1908.

His grief-stricken wife committed suicide on June 10 of the same year after having tried to do so on April 25. Lewis Allen Browne in his preface to Evolution : A Fantasy (1909) wrote: "Their lives and affections linked as they were, in his poetic fancy at least, since the beginning of time seemed to have created between them in reality a bond too close to survive a parting."

Evolution Aside from his journalism Smith's only known work is the romantic poem "Evolution", sometimes sub-titled or mistakenly called "A Tadpole and a Fish". The poem became very popular even before his death. It has been reprinted many times since.

In his biographical sketch of Smith Lewis Allen Brown describes it as follows: "… it is as the author of Evolution that he is best remembered. Skilled as a war correspondent, himself a veteran Indian fighter, a technical writer of sports, possessed of a mentality too great to be handicapped through lack of university training, he thought for himself upon life and death, of the past and future, and in Evolution voiced his beliefs." Tributes to him on his death invariably emphasize the poem. According to a notice in the Ocala (Florida) Evening Star of April 17, 1908: "Langdon Smith, the war correspondent and writer, died on Wednesday, at his home in Brooklyn, New York. No New York newspaper man was better known than Smith, who could describe, equally well, a battle or a baseball game, says the New York Post. But the thing that he wrote which will live the longest -- because it is worth while—is his poem "Evolution," which has been reprinted all over the country."

Evolution is reprinted, with hyperlinks and comments, on the Wikiquote page devoted to the poem and to Smith.