Thorne Smith

Lore & Background

Smith was born in Annapolis, Maryland, the son of a Navy commodore. He attended Locust Dale Academy, St. Luke's preparatory school, and two years at Dartmouth College, leaving in June 1912. The period between 1912 and his enlistment in the Navy in December 1917 is not well-documented; he spent time with his father and worked in advertising. In the winter of 1916, he lived at the same New York boarding house as poet Dorothy Parker; the exact nature of their relationship is unclear, though Parker recalled they talked and had fun, while one biographer suggests they made love.

After World War I, Smith left the Navy in January and moved to Greenwich Village, working part-time as an advertising agent. He lived at the Greenwich Village Inn, keeping company with Sinclair Lewis, John Reed, and others. He married Celia Sullivan in the fall of 1919; they had two daughters, Marion and June. Smith was an early resident of Free Acres, a social experimental community in New Jersey. He seldom frequented night clubs, preferring his New Jersey estate and the coasts of southern France. He died of a heart attack in 1934 at age 42 while vacationing in Florida.

Smith's first published works were compilations of his naval newspaper stories and a book of poetry. Topper was published in 1926. Over the next eight years, he wrote eleven more works, including a serious novel, a mystery, a children's book, and several comedic fantasies. He characterized his own works as having no point, getting nowhere, and being a little mad and purposeless, like life itself.

Reader's Guide

Thorne Smith's significance lies in his creation of a distinctive blend of supernatural fantasy and screwball comedy that proved enormously popular during the 1930s and again in the 1950s. His Topper novels, featuring a respectable banker haunted by a pair of mischievous ghosts, established a template for comic ghost stories that influenced later film and television adaptations. Smith's work often involved body swaps, transformations, and the disruption of conventional society through fantastic events, allowing for explorations of repressed desires and social norms. His writing style, described by one critic as combining elements of Charles Bukowski, S. J. Perelman, Damon Runyon, Lewis Carroll, and Mark Twain, was marked by high-spirited irreverence and a fine disdain for convention. Though Smith left no personal papers, his legacy endures through his novels, which remained in print for decades, and through the character of Topper, who appeared in multiple film adaptations. His influence can be traced in later comic fantasy writers who similarly used the supernatural to satirize and liberate their characters from societal constraints.

Did You Know?

• Smith's first published book, Biltmore Oswald: The Diary of a Hapless Recruit, sold 70,000 copies.
• His novel Turnabout (1931) is a comedic body-swap story involving an Egyptian idol.