Cosmic Scholar: The Life and Times of Harry Smith [Paperback]

Named one of the Best Books of 2023 by theNew YorkerandThe New York Times' Dwight Garner. Winner of theASCAP Foundation Deems Taylor/Virgil Thomson Book Award.

The first comprehensive biography of this hipster magus . . . [John Szwed] allows different sides of Smiths 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

Grammy Awardwinning music scholar and celebrated biographer John Szwed presents the first biography of Harry Smith, the brilliant eccentric who transformed twentieth century art and culture.

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, had a front-row seat to a young Thelonious Monk, lived with (and tortured) Allen Ginsberg, was admired by Susan Sontag, and was one of the first artists funded by Guggenheim Foundation. He was always broke, generally 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.

InCosmic Scholar, the Grammy Award-winning music scholar and celebrated biographer John Szwed patches together, for the first time, the life of one of the twentieth centurys most overlooked cultural figures. From his time recording the customs of Native American tribes in the Pacific Northwest and Florida to his life 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 influentialAnthology of American Folk Musicand several pioneering experimental films, but was also an insufferable and destructive eccentric who was unable to survive in regular society, or keep himself healthy olƒF