James Thorne Smith Jr. (March 27, 1892 – June 20, 1934) was an American writer of humorous supernatural fantasy fiction under the byline Thorne Smith. He is best known today for the two Topper novels, comic fantasy fiction involving sex, frequent drinking and ghosts. With racy illustrations, these sold millions of copies in the 1930s and were equally popular in paperbacks of the 1950s.
Smith was born in Annapolis, Maryland, the son of a Navy commodore. He attended Locust Dale Academy, a boarding school, in Virginia (now closed), St. Luke's preparatory school in Wayne, Pennsylvania, and two years at Dartmouth College. He left in June 1912.
In his 2012 biography, A Man Named Smith: The Novels and Screen Legacy of Thorne Smith, Anthony Slide writes, "Thorne Smith left no papers, anyone writing about the author must, of necessity, rely on one primary source, and that is the 1951 dissertation by Joseph Leo Blotner titled Thorne Smith: A Study in Popular Fiction." However, we also have the short 32-page biography, Thorne Smith: His Life and Times, written by the actor Roland Young, a close friend of Smith since 1930 who played the character Topper in several movie adaptations of Smith's work.
The period between 1912 and Smith's enlistment in the Navy (1917) is not well-documented. He spent time with his father, and worked in advertising.
In the winter of 1916, Smith and the poet Dorothy Parker (Dorothy Rothschild at the time) lived at the same New York boarding house at 103rd Street and Broadway. The exact nature of their relationship is not clear; Dorothy Parker herself stated, "We used to sit around in the evening and talk. There was no money but Jesus we had fun." Anthony Slide makes more of it, saying "Smith would spend time in Parker's room, drinking coffee, helping her revise her poetry and making love."
He enlisted in the US Navy in December 1917, the United States having entered World War I in April 1917. He was appointed editor of the Naval Reserve newspaper The Broadside. After the war ended, Smith left the Navy in January and moved to Greenwich Village. In need of money, he worked part-time as an advertising agent.
He lived for two years at the Greenwich Village Inn, where Young reports that he kept company with Sinclair Lewis, John Reed, Barney Gallant, Harold Stearns, Jack Conroy, and "various other stout spirits." He also met his future wife, Celia Sullivan, in Greenwich Village. They were married in the fall of 1919 in Rye, New York. Their first daughter, Marion, was born on November 14, 1922, and their second daughter June on March 4, 1924.
He was an early resident of Free Acres, a social experimental community developed by Bolton Hall according to the economic principles of Henry George, in Berkeley Heights, New Jersey.
Young wrote that Smith seldom frequented night clubs and preferred his "small estate in New Jersey to his city apartment, and the soft coasts of southern France to either."
He died of a heart attack in 1934 at the age of 42 while vacationing in Florida.
Between 1919 when he left the Navy and the publication of Topper, Smith's only published works were Biltmore Oswald: The Diary of a Hapless Recruit, a compilation of his stories in The Broadside; a sequel, Out O' Luck: Biltmore Oswald Very Much at Sea; and Haunts and Bypaths, a book of poetry.
In the eight years after Topper, he wrote another eleven works of fiction. One was a serious novel (Dream's End 1927), one a mystery novel (Did She Fall?; 1930), and one a children's book (Lazy Bear Lane; 1931). The rest contained many of the same comedic elements as Topper.
Smith characterized his own works within a short autobiographical section (less than eight pages) within Young's book: Like life itself my stories have no point and get absolutely nowhere. And like life they are a little mad and purposeless. They resemble those people who watch with placid concentration a steam shovel digging a large hole in the ground. They are almost as purposeless as a dignified commuter an impotent fist after a train he has just missed. They are like the man who dashes madly through traffic only to linger aimlessly on the opposite corner watching a fountain pen being demonstrated in a shop window.
Quite casually I wander into my plot, poke around with my characters for a while, then amble off, leaving no moral proved, and no reader improved. Paul Di Filippo in the St. James Guide to Fantasy Writers wrote of Smith's writing:If one were to attempt to fabricate a writer from bits and pieces of Charles Bukowski, S. J. Perelman, Damon Runyon, Lewis Carroll and Mark Twain, one might possibly come close to creating a figure like Thorne Smith. But such a chimera would still surely not possess the original's high-spirited elan, sense of utter irresponsibility and fine disdain for all forms of convention—traits which found their perfect embodiment in a series of "ribald" screwball novels where the fantastic plays a pivotal part in disrupting society, unleashing repressed individuals and shattering unnatural strictures.
Roland Young described Smith as someone who mostly read "serious" authors such as "Wassermann, Knut Hamsun, Nexo, Rolland, and William Boebe, and a number of writers on travel and exploration".
Thorne Smith himself acknowledged no influences.
Anthony Slide wrote of Smith:The most obvious, but unacknowledged, influence in the writings of Thorne Smith is the English novelist Thomas Anstey Guthrie (1856-1934), who wrote under the pseudonym of F. Anstey. His first novel, Vice Versa, published in 1882, contains elements to be found in Smith’s work. It is rightfully argued that all “body swap” plots owe much to Anstey’s writings.
Biltmore Oswald: The Diary of a Hapless Recruit (1918). A series of comic stories written for the Naval Reserve journal The Broadside while Smith was in the Navy. It sold 70,000 copies.