Grammy Award-winning music scholar and celebrated biographer John Szwed presents the first biography of Harry Smith, the brilliant eccentric who transformed twentieth century art and culture.
Includes black-and-white and color images.
Exhaustively researched, energetically told, and complete with a trove of images, Cosmic Scholar is a feat of biographical restoration and the long overdue deification of an American icon.
He was so devious, said Ginsberg, and so saintly.
He was an insatiable creator and collector, responsible for the influential Anthology of American Folk Music and several pioneering experimental films, but was also an insufferable and destructive eccentric who was unable to survive in regular society, or keep himself healthy or sober.
From his time recording the customs of Native American tribes in the Pacific Northwest and Florida to living in Greenwich Village in its heyday, Smith was consumed by an unceasing desire to create a unified theory of culture.
In Cosmic Scholar , John Szwed patches together, for the first time, the Life of one of the twentieth century\'s most overlooked cultural figures.
Harry Smith was, in the words of Robert Frank, the only person I met in my Life that transcended everything.
He was always broke, always intoxicated, compulsively irascible, and unimpeachably authentic.
He taught Patti Smith and Robert Mapplethorpe about the occult, swapped drugs with Timothy Leary, sat at the piano with Thelonious Monk, lived with (and tortured) Allen Ginsberg, argued film with Susan Sontag, and received one of the first Guggenheim grants.
He was an anthropologist, filmmaker, painter, folklorist, mystic, and walking encyclopedia.
Grammy Award-winning music scholar and celebrated biographer John Szwed presents the first biography of Harry Smith, the brilliant eccentric who transformed twentieth century art and culture
