William Gardner Smith

William Gardner Smith (February 6, 1927 – November 5, 1974) was an American journalist, novelist, and editor. Smith is linked to the black social protest novel tradition of the 1940s and the 1950s,^[1] a movement that became synonymous with writers such as Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, Willard Motley, and Ann Petry. Smith's third book, South Street (1954), is considered to be one of the first black militant protest novels.^[1] His last published novel, The Stone Face (1963), in its account of the Paris massacre of 1961, "stand[s] as one of the few representations of the event available all the way up until the early 1990s".^[2]

Smith was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, of African-American descent. After 1951, he maintained an expatriate status in France. However, due to his various journalistic and editorial assignments, he also lived for extended periods of time in Ghana, West Africa. In the final decade of his life, he traveled to the United States to visit family and friends and write about the racial and social upheaval that was occurring there.

Some of Smith's journalism and reportage from this period was published in various media outlets in France and Europe. Some of it was revised, re-adapted, and published in Return To Black America in 1970. Smith, who spoke fluent French, was a frequent contributor and guest on radio and television programs in France, where he was considered an expert on the political struggle, civil unrest, and racial tension in the United States during the late 1960s and early 1970s.

Smith was diagnosed with cancer in October 1973 and died just over a year later in Thiais, in the southern suburbs of Paris, France. He was cremated and his ashes were interred at the columbarium at Paris's Père Lachaise Cemetery.