William Gardner Smith

William Gardner Smith (February 6, 1927 – November 5, 1974) was an American journalist, novelist, and editor. Smith is linked to the black social protest novel tradition of the 1940s and the 1950s, In Smith's senior year, his high-school principal helped him secure a part-time position with the Pittsburgh Courier. Smith graduated from Benjamin Franklin High School with honors in January 1944 at the age of 16, the second highest student in his class.

Smith's status as a foreigner and expatriate marked him as an insider and outsider in two cultures, the United States and Europe. By the early 1960s, as a black American working in a foreign land and witness to injustice on two continents, the stakes were raised for Smith in the composition of this novel. It pushed his capacities as an artist, writer, and journalist to their limits. In this novel and his subsequent journalistic writing and reportage, Smith testified to the social, political, and cultural happenings of his adopted country as a way to explore and address everyday racism in the United States. In France, Smith was considered an expert on the racial situation in the United States, especially after he published a report in 1967 on the revolts within American black ghettos.

Smith remarried on October 31, 1961, to Solange Royez. Their daughter, Michelle, was born in 1963, and a son was born in Accra, Ghana, in 1965. Their marriage ended in divorce in 1969. In 1971, Smith married Ira Reuben, a native of India. Their daughter Rachel was born in 1971.

Selected bibliography Major works Last of the Conquerors (New York: Farrar, Straus, 1948; London: Gollancz, 1949). Anger at Innocence (New York: Farrar, Straus, 1950; London: Gollancz, 1951) – Malheur aux justes, Club Français du Livre, 1952, 293 pages, translated by Jean Rosenthal. South Street (New York: Farrar, Straus and Young, 1954). The Stone Face (New York: Farrar, Straus, 1963); new edition, with an introduction by Adam Shatz, published by New York Review Books Classics, 2021, Return to Black America (Englewood Cliffs, N. J.: Prentice-Hall, 1970) – L'Amérique noire, Paris: Casterman, 1972, translated by Rosine Fitzgerald.

Periodical publications "The Negro Writer: Pitfalls and Compensations," Phylon, 11 (Fourth Quarter 1950): 297–303. "European Backdrop," Pittsburgh Courier, January 5, 1952, p. 3.