Thorne Smith

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.

Life

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."