Overview

"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, and argued film with Susan Sontag. 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. He was ""so devious,"" said Ginsberg, and ""so saintly."" Exhaustively researched and energetically told, Cosmic Scholar is a feat of biographical restoration and the long overdue deification of an American icon."

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"""Harry Smith was a mythic figure in plain sight...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"" ""Masterfully puts [Smith's] puzzle of a life together...A revelatory portrait of a unique pop-culture figure."" -- ""Kirkus Reviews"""

Author Information

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 twenty-six 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. Paul Woodson has won SOVAS and AudioFile Earphones Awards, and has recorded close to 350 audiobooks in many different genres-including romance, fiction, history, biography, and mystery-and received his BFA in acting from Boston University. In his theater days, he worked in many NYC shows, toured the USA and Europe, and played the title role as Vincent van Gogh in the sung-through, OOBR Award-winning musical Vincent. He enjoys backpacking the Appalachian Trail and visiting National Parks in his spare time. He is a member of SAG-AFTRA.

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