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Harry Allen Smith was an American journalist, humorist, and author.
Background
He was born on December 19, 1907 in McLeansboro, Illinois, United States, one of the nine children of Henry Smith and Adeline ("Addie") Allen. The family left McLeansboro before H. Allen's ninth birthday. The family moved to Decatur, Illinois, and then to Defiance, Ohio, before settling in 1919 in Huntington, Indiana, where his father obtained a job in a poultry house.
Education
In Huntington Smith attended St. Mary's Parochial School through the eighth grade.
Career
He worked as a farm laborer, a chicken plucker, and a shoeshine boy. When he was fifteen, he got his first newspaper job as a proofreader with the Huntington Press and quickly rose to the position of reporter. His stay in Huntington ended two years later when he wrote a ribald story that a friend copied and circulated in the local high school. After a copy of "Stranded on a Davenport" made its way to the principal's office, Smith was arrested. He had to pay a $22. 50 fine for writing and circulating "lewd, licentious, obscene, and lascivious literature" and, effectively a social outcast, immediately left town.
Smith, who shortened his name to H. Allen, spent the next twenty years as an itinerant newspaperman, moving from town to town and paper to paper. Along the way he developed and refined his talent for perceiving and exposing the underlying absurdity in the situations he encountered. He worked as a reporter first in Jeffersonville, and then in Louisville, for the Evening Post and the Times.
At the age of nineteen he became editor of the daily Sebring American in Florida. When the American folded in 1927, Smith worked briefly for the Tribune in Tulsa, Okla. , before moving on to the Denver Post. In 1929 he left the Post and went to New York City where he was employed as a feature writer for United Press until 1934. He then worked for several radio and film companies before joining the New York World-Telegram in 1936 as a rewrite man and later a feature interviewer and composer of humorous articles.
Smith's first full-length book, Robert Gair, was published in 1939 and garnered favorable reviews, but his second, Mr. Klein's Kampf, (1940) received little notice. His long years of apprenticeship as a writer finally paid off with publication in 1941 of the best-selling Low Man on a Totem Pole. In this collection of interviews, autobiographical sketches, and trivia, Smith returned to what he did best, observing the world around him and reflecting it back filtered through his own slightly skewed perspective.
He left the World-Telegram in 1941 and accepted the offer of the United Feature Syndicate. His column was a success, but Smith believed the onset of World War II would cause newspapers to tighten their budgets by discarding newer features. Since he already had numerous magazine assignments as well as a contract to write another book, in April 1942, he canceled the contract on his last newspaper job. Throughout the 1940's he was rarely off the best-seller lists with books such as Lost in the Horse Latitudes (1944).
In the mid-1940's, Smith moved his family to suburban Mt. Kisco in Westchester County, New York.
In 1967 he moved to Alpine, Texas, a small town he first visited in 1947 while collecting material for We Went Thataway (1949). Smith continued to write prolifically until his death in 1976 while on a visit to San Francisco.
(This is a reproduction of a book published before 1923. T...)
Views
He took a humorous look at Hollywood. He noted, for example, that Hollywood geniuses come in three sizes, "those who are geniuses and speak about it frequently; those who are actually not geniuses but somebody told them they were so they do everything but wear badges proclaiming it; and genuine geniuses who keep their mouths shut about their affliction and do their work. "
Quotations:
When asked to characterize his work he answered, "I am generally referred to as a humorist but I don't particularly care for the designation. I prefer to think of myself as a reporter, a reporter with a humorous slant. I am funny in the sense that the world is funny. " At another time, he defined a humorist as "a fellow who realizes, first, that he is no better than anybody else, and second, that nobody else is either. "
Personality
Smith himself never forgot his roots in journalism.
Quotes from others about the person
Bergen Evans, in his introduction to The World, the Flesh and H. Allen Smith, calls him "an American humorist in the tradition of Mark Twain and James Thurber. Future historians will be indebted to Smith for his insight and for his honesty in depicting American culture. "
Connections
He met Nelle Mae Simpson, a graduate of the University of Missouri School of Journalism and society editor for the paper, they were married April 14, 1927. It was in Denver that the Smith's two children were born.