In COSMIC SCHOLAR: The Life and Times of Harry Smith, music scholar and biographer John Szwed patches together, for the first time, the life of one of the twentieth century’s most overlooked cultural figures. This fascinating work has received three starred reviews!
“Drawing on extensive research to fill in his subject’s emotional states, Szwed sensitively renders the extraordinary, bizarre, and ultimately tragic life that Smith ‘devoted… completely to art, in some ways turning [that life] into a work of art, his own personal surrealism.’ The result is a masterful ode to a ‘strange and singular character’ in American arts.”–Publishers Weekly, starred review
“Szwed is the ideal chronicler for a person worth knowing but so hard to pin down. Szwed, as lively a writer as he is scrupulous, has produced an excellent and engaging biography, the story of an elusive but important and utterly fascinating figure.”–Library Journal, starred review
“Music writer and biographer Szwed confronted both a mammoth and chaotic trove of materials and an even larger void of tragically lost artworks and collections as he assiduously and passionately constructed this engrossing, revelatory, often beyond-belief portrait of a reckless, maddening, cosmic, and transformational genius.”–Booklist, starred review
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