Background
He was born on June 19, 1875 in Chicago, Illinois, United States, the only child of the Rev. Justin Almerin Smith, a Baptist minister, and Mary L. (Grose) Smith.
(Excerpt from Chicago: A Portrait From the north window O...)
Excerpt from Chicago: A Portrait From the north window Of a sky-scraper club, one looks down upon the birthplace of Chicago. What now lies there is a boulevard spanning a gray-blue river. The crossing is by a bridge which is one Of the busiest, though not the tallest, in the world. Past its heavy pillars, with their bas-reliefs, the boulevard runs on, inaccurately north. In the foreground stand sky-scrapers, like the halves Of an enormous gateway. Between these, and on and on, pass ing structures high and low, the street, a sleek ribbon, rises, narrows, rounds a slight bend, and disappears. Far below the point Of Observation two continuous rows of motor-cars glide like thin caterpillars, northward and southward. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.
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He was born on June 19, 1875 in Chicago, Illinois, United States, the only child of the Rev. Justin Almerin Smith, a Baptist minister, and Mary L. (Grose) Smith.
After preparatory schooling at Chicago's Morgan Park Military Academy he attended the University of Chicago, from which he was graduated in 1898 with high honors in classical studies.
Within a year after graduation he joined the staff of the Chicago Daily News, and his full journalistic career, from reporter to managing editor, was spent on that newspaper. Chicago newspaper legend has it that he was appointed city editor because he was one of the few steadily sober men in the news room. He served in this post from 1901 to 1906, then as assistant managing editor for the next seven years. He was news editor from 1913 to 1924, except for a year during the first World War when he went to Paris to coordinate the work of the Daily News's foreign staff.
In 1924 he left the paper to work as a special adviser on promotion and public relations to President Ernest DeWitt Burton of the University of Chicago. He returned to the Daily News in 1926 as managing editor, never again to leave it.
A man whose mild ways masked a courageous will, he was one of the few editors of that period who refused to depict the big gangsters as latter-day Robin Hoods. "They're small-time hoodlums, " he told his reporters and writers. "Call them that. " Smith's basic conception of the daily newspaper was not as a mere conveyer of information but, as one of his prime proteges, Ben Hecht, later put it, "as a daily novel written by a score of Balzacs.
Staff reporters of his time included Carl Sandburg, who covered everything from labor to movies; Lloyd Lewis, the critic and historian; Harry Hansen, Robert J. Casey, John V. A. Weaver, Vincent Starrett, and Keith Preston. Smith encouraged them all to be dutiful reporters, but, more important, to write as if they were novelists. Smith wrote little for the Daily News.
He was the author of many books, all marked by precise clarity and a poet's instinct for words. His first was a novel, The Other Side of the Wall (1919). In 1922 he published Deadlines. Two years later came Josslyn, an autobiographical novel set in the newspaper world he knew so well. His collaboration with Lloyd Lewis resulted in Chicago: The History of Its Reputation (1929) and Oscar Wilde Discovers America (1936).
He died of complications from pneumonia in the Evanston (Illinois) Hospital.
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(Excerpt from Chicago: A Portrait From the north window O...)
Quotations: "I'd go to hell for a feature story, " he often said, "but only as far as purgatory for a study in economics. "
Smith was a quiet young man, gaunt and with an air of diffidence, when a young. He was a sharp, keen-witted journalist with a fine sense of news, well able to compete in the hurly-burly of Chicago journalism.
Smith was married in 1899 to a cousin, Katharine Augusta Smith. They had no children.