Cosmic Scholar: The Life and Times of Harry Smith

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He was an anthropologist, a filmmaker, a painter, a folklorist, a mystic, and a walking encyclopedia. He taught Patti Smith and Robert Mapplethorpe about the occult, swapped drugs with Timothy Leary, jammed with Thelonious Monk, lived with Allen Ginsberg, and received one of the first Guggenheim grants. He was always broke, frequently 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, the celebrated biographer John Szwed reconstructs, 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 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 collector, responsible for the influential Anthology of American Folk Music and several pioneering experimental films, but he was also a destructive eccentric who was unable to survive in regular society or keep himself healthy or sober. 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. Includes 32 pages of black-and-white and color images

Reviews

"[Cosmic Scholar] is the first comprehensive biography of this hipster magus . . . It's a knowing and thoughtful book . . . [by] a perspicacious reporter. [Szwed] wrestles this material into a loose but sturdy form . . . He allows different sides of Smith's personality to catch blades of sun. He brings the right mixture of reverence and comic incredulity to his task." --Dwight Garner, The New York Times

"[A] highly enjoyable biography . . . Cosmic Scholar is an impressively full portrait of an erratic subject." --Timothy Farrington, Wall Street Journal

"Szwed confronted both a mammoth and chaotic trove of materials and an even larger void of tragically lost artworks and collections as he assiduously and passionately constructed this engrossing, revelatory, often beyond-belief portrait of a reckless, maddening, cosmic, and transformational genius." --Booklist (starred review)

"Szwed is the ideal chronicler for a person worth knowing but so hard to pin down . . . As lively a writer as he is scrupulous, [he] has produced an excellent and engaging biography, the story of an elusive but important and utterly fascinating figure." --Library Journal (starred review)

"In this vividly detailed biography, music scholar Szwed brilliantly captures the life and legacy of the enigmatic filmmaker, folklorist, painter, producer, anthropologist, archivist, Kabbalist, and alchemist Harry Smith . . . Drawing on extensive research to fill in his subject's emotional states, Szwed sensitively renders [Smith's] extraordinary, bizarre, and ultimately tragic life . . . A masterful ode to a 'strange and singular character' in American arts." --Publishers Weekly (starred review)

"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

Author Bio

John Szwed is the author or editor of nineteen 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 he 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. He lives in Philadelphia with his family.