Cosmic Scholar
The Life and Times of Harry Smith
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- $24.99
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- $24.99
Publisher Description
Named one of the Best Books of 2023 by the New Yorker and The New York Times' Dwight Garner
“The first comprehensive biography of this hipster magus . . . [John Szwed] 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
Grammy Award–winning 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.”
In Cosmic 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 century’s 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 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, 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 canonization of an American icon.
Includes black-and-white and color images
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this vividly detailed biography, music scholar Szwed (Billie Holiday) brilliantly captures the life and legacy of the enigmatic filmmaker, folklorist, painter, producer, anthropologist, archivist, Kabbalist, and alchemist Harry Smith (1923–1991). Gathering information about Smith's "scattered" life from incomplete archives (much was lost during Smith's stints living on the streets), Szwed paints his subject as an influential force in American art, admired by the likes of Leonard Cohen, Patti Smith, and Allen Ginsberg. Smith's work elided boundaries between folk and fine art; his landmark 1952 Anthology of American Folk Music, a six-LP collection of rediscovered commercial recordings, was instrumental "to the folk music revival," while several of his films, including Heaven and Earth Magic (1957) and Mahagonny (1980), were featured in the Museum of Modern Art and the Louvre. Despite his influence, he died destitute, of cardiac arrest, in a Manhattan hotel room in 1991, the same year he won a Chairman's Merit Award Grammy with Harry Belafonte. Drawing on extensive research to fill in his subject's emotional states, Szwed sensitively renders the extraordinary, bizarre, and ultimately tragic life that Smith "devoted... completely to art, in some ways turning into a work of art, his own personal surrealism." The result is a masterful ode to a "strange and singular character" in American arts.
