Paul Myron Anthony Linebarger (July 11, 1913 – August 6, 1966), known by his pen-name Cordwainer Smith, was an American author of science fiction. He was an officer in the US Army, a noted scholar of East Asia, and an expert in psychological warfare. He was one of science fiction's more influential authors despite his relatively limited output and his early death at the age of 53.
Linebarger's father, Paul Myron Wentworth Linebarger, was a lawyer, working as a judge in the Philippines. There he met Chinese nationalist Sun Yat-sen to whom he became an advisor. Linebarger's father sent his wife to give birth in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, so that their child would be eligible to become president of the United States. Sun Yat-sen, who was considered the father of Chinese nationalism, became Linebarger's godfather.
His childhood was unsettled as his father moved the family to a succession of places in Asia, Europe, and the United States. He was sometimes sent to boarding schools for safety. In all, Linebarger attended more than 30 schools. In 1919, while at a boarding school in Hawaii, he was blinded in his right eye, which was replaced by a glass eye. The vision in his remaining eye was impaired by infection.
Linebarger was familiar with English, German, and Chinese by adulthood. At the age of 23, he received a PhD in political science from Johns Hopkins University.
From 1937 to 1946, Linebarger held a faculty appointment at Duke University, where he began producing highly regarded works on Far Eastern affairs.
While retaining his professorship at Duke after the beginning of World War II, Linebarger began serving as a second lieutenant of the United States Army, where he was involved in the creation of the Office of War Information and the Operation Planning and Intelligence Board. He also helped to organize the army's first psychological warfare section. In 1943, he was sent to China to coordinate military intelligence operations. When he later pursued his interest in China, Linebarger became a close confidant of Chiang Kai-shek. By the end of the war, he had risen to the rank of major. In 1947, Linebarger moved to the Johns Hopkins University's School of Advanced International Studies in Washington, DC, where he served as Professor of Asiatic Studies. He used his experiences in the war to write the book Psychological Warfare (1948), regarded by many in the field as a classic text.
Linebarger eventually rose to the rank of colonel in the reserves. He was recalled to advise the British forces during the Malayan Emergency and the U.S. Eighth Army during the Korean War. Though he sometimes called himself a "visitor to small wars", he refrained from becoming involved in the Vietnam War, but he did some work for the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). In 1969, CIA officer Miles Copeland Jr. wrote that Linebarger was "perhaps the leading practitioner of 'black' and 'gray' propaganda in the Western world". According to Joseph Burkholder Smith, a former CIA operative, Linebarger conducted classes in psychological warfare for CIA agents at his home in Washington, under cover of his position at Johns Hopkins University. He traveled extensively and became a member of the Foreign Policy Association, and he was called upon to advise President John F. Kennedy.
In April 2026, Linebarger was posthumously inducted as a Distinguished Member of the Psychological Operations Regiment (DMOR) by the United States Army John F. Kennedy Special Warfare Center and School, recognizing his contributions to the development of psychological warfare and the early institutional framework of U.S. Army psychological operations.
In 1936, Linebarger married Margaret Snow. They had a daughter in 1942 and another in 1947. They divorced in 1949.
In 1950, Linebarger married his second wife Genevieve Collins; they had no children. They remained married until his death from a heart attack in 1966; he died at Johns Hopkins University Medical Center in Baltimore, Maryland, at the age of 53. Linebarger had expressed a wish to retire to Australia, which he had visited while traveling. He is buried in Arlington National Cemetery, Section 35, Grave Number 4712. His widow, Genevieve Collins Linebarger, was interred with him on November 16, 1981.
Linebarger is rumored to have been Kirk Allen, the pseudonymous patient of psychologist Robert M. Lindner whose case was featured in a chapter of Lindner's 1954 book The Fifty-Minute Hour. Allen was described as a college educated man who worked for the United States military and imagined himself as the protagonist of an elaborately detailed science fictional world.
According to Cordwainer Smith scholar Alan C. Elms, this speculation first reached print in Brian Aldiss's 1973 science fiction history Billion Year Spree; Aldiss, in turn, claimed to have received the information from science fiction fan and scholar Leon Stover. More recently, both Elms and librarian Lee Weinstein have gathered circumstantial evidence to support their case for Linebarger's being Allen, but both concede there is no direct proof that Linebarger was ever a patient of Lindner's or that he suffered from a disorder similar to that of Kirk Allen. Other investigators have proposed that Allen was someone other than Linebarger.
Frederik Pohl commented on the imaginary universe of Linebarger's fiction:
In his stories, which were a wonderful and inimitable blend of a strange, raucous poetry and a detailed technological scene, we begin to read of human beings in worlds so far from our own in space in time that they were no longer quite Earth (even when they were the third planet out from Sol), and the people were no longer quite human, but something perhaps better, certainly different.
Linebarger's identity as "Cordwainer Smith" was a secret until his death. Cordwainer is an archaic word for "a worker in cordwain or cordovan leather; a shoemaker", and a smith is "one who works in iron or other metals; esp. a blacksmith or farrier"; these are two kinds of skilled workers using traditional materials.
Linebarger also used the literary pseudonyms "Carmichael Smith" (for the political thriller Atomsk), "Anthony Bearden" (for poetry) and "Felix C. Forrest" (for the novels Ria and Carola).
Some of Smith's stories are written in a narrative style closer to traditional Chinese stories than to most English-language fiction, and reminiscent of the Genji tales by the Japanese writer Lady Murasaki. His total science fiction output is relatively small, because of his time-consuming profession and his early death.
Smith's works consist of two parts: