FROM THE NOWHERE INTO THE UNKNOWN. He was a friend and contemporary of such
writers as James Thurber and Sinclair Lewis. None of his 16 books ever
topped the best-sellers list, but his work has remained so popular with the
public over the past 60 years that he has outsold nearly all of his more
critically acclaimed peers. He was Dorothy Parker's friend and lover during
her formative years as a writer, but neither she nor her Algonquin Round
Table wits so much as even mentioned him in any of their writings regarding
those historic years of the Roaring Twenties. His name was Thorne Smith.
New York City's writing scene in the 1920's and 1930's flourished with
creative ambition the likes of which the world hasn't seen since. Sinclair
Lewis, James Thurber, Robert Benchley, Dorothy Parker, Alexander Woollcott,
Ring Lardner, Robert Sherwood and more called Greenwich Village their home.
They drew the publicity while F. Scott Fitzgerald and others gathered the
critical praise but quietly in their midst Thorne Smith practiced his magic:
selling 40,000 copies each of his first two books BILTMORE OSWALD and OUT O'
LUCK while also being published in H.L. Mencken's The Smart Set. But it
wasn't until 1926 that he broke free from the shadows of his more famous
friends when he took the traditional ghost story and set it permanently on
its ear with TOPPER.
Today's audiences think nothing out of the ordinary about CASPER THE FRIENDLY
GHOST, BEETLEJUICE, or the romantic supernatural possibilities of GHOST or
WHAT DREAMS MAY COME, but prior to TOPPER most ghost stories were unsettling
tales in the Wilkie Collins or M.R. James tradition. Thorne Smith would
forever change our relationship to ghosts and the supernatural by breaking
every rule of logic and convention with his stories.
Please be sure to visit Scarlet Street's web siteat http://www.scarletstreet.com. To order issue # 37 please point your browser toward: http://www.scarletstreet.com/scarlet/back.htm.
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