Thorne Smith

Thorne Smith
Smith in the mid-1920s
Born	James Thorne Jr (1892-03-27)March 27, 1892 Annapolis, Maryland
Died	June 20, 1934(1934-06-20) (aged 42) Florida
Occupation	Author
Period	1918–1934, 1941 (posthumously)
Genre	Comic fantasy fiction, mystery, poetry, screenwriting
Notable works	Topper
Website
www.thornesmith.net

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, and attended Dartmouth College. In 1919, after being discharged from the Navy the same year, he moved to Greenwich Village, where he met Celia Sullivan whom he would marry. In need of money, he worked part-time as an advertising agent. Their first daughter Marion was born on November 14, 1922, and their second daughter June on March 4, 1924. In 1926 Smith achieved meteoric success with the publication of Topper. 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.^[1][2] He died of a heart attack in 1934 at the age of 42 while vacationing in Florida.^[3]

Smith was a close friend of actor Roland Young, who played the character Topper in several movie adaptations of Smith's work. After Smith's death, Young wrote a short biography, Thorne Smith: His Life and Times.^[4]

• 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.
• Out O' Luck: Biltmore Oswald Very Much at Sea (1919).
• Haunts and Bypaths (1919). A book of poetry.
• Topper (1926, copyright renewed 1953, but now in the public domain in the US; also known as The Jovial Ghosts). This and its sequel, Topper Takes a Trip (1932, set in the French Riviera), are probably Smith's most famous work. They concern a respectable banker called Cosmo Topper, married to his depressingly staid wife Mary, and his misadventures with a couple of ghosts, Marion and George Kerby, who introduce him to other ghosts. He is romantically attracted to Marion, who at one point tries to kill him so that they can always be together. Mary is treated sympathetically—she does not like what she has become and tries to change.

• Dream's End (1927, copyright renewed 1955). A serious novel that was not a success.
• The Stray Lamb (1929). Mild-mannered investment banker, cuckold, and dipsomaniac T. Lawrence Lamb gains perspective on the human condition during a series of mysterious transformations into various animal forms. Lamb, his daughter Hebe, her boyfriend Melville Long, and Hebe's friend Sandra Rush (a twentyish lingerie model who becomes Lamb's love interest) pursue several adventures, most of which fall well outside the perimeter of law and order. Lamb has a shrewish and adulterous wife who tries to murder him when he is a goldfish. A courtroom scene involving the protagonists and an exasperated judge provides a climax.
• Did She Fall? (1930).
• The Night Life of the Gods (1931). Quirky inventor Hunter Hawk strikes gold when he invents a device enabling him to turn living matter into stone. After a chaotic field test he meets stunning 900-year-old Megaera, who teaches him to turn stone into flesh. They and some friends set their sights on New York City to bring the Roman gods of the Metropolitan Museum of Art to life: Mercury shows himself an expert pickpocket, while Neptune causes chaos in the fish market.
• Turnabout (1931) pits two modern married people into a battle of the sexes. Noticing the bickering and jealousy of a young man and wife, an Egyptian idol causes them to switch bodies. Tim Willows works in an advertising agency, and several of the scenes draw on author Thorne Smith's experience. After his wife, Sally, impregnates her husband, things take a turn for the worse as they separately try to deal with the object of the former wife's affections—a philanderer by the name of Carl Bentley.

• Lazy Bear Lane (1931). A children's book.^[5]
• The Bishop's Jaegers (1932). The depressed, indifferent heir of a vast coffee import fortune, Peter Van Dyke finds his life and high society engagement turned upside down when his secretary, Josephine Duval, determines to “rescue” him by ruining him morally. After a scandal in a coat closet, he is cast adrift in a fog with a motley crew that includes a bishop of the Episcopal Church and a former nude model named Aspirin Liz. The party lands on the shores of a naturist resort, and the liberation of the coffee importer is set in motion.
• Rain in the Doorway (1933). A cuckold husband, Hector Owen, inadvertently becomes a partner in a big-city department store. The bulk of the action involves the inebriated adventures of Owen, his three partners (Mr. Horace Larkin, a man called Dinner, and Major Barney Britt-Britt), and a salesgirl from the pornographic books department, Miss Honor "Satin" Knightly. The novel includes many direct suggestions of sexual encounters, accompanied with cartoons of nude women cavorting with the protagonists, drawn by artist Herbert Roese.
• Skin and Bones (1933). A photographer's freak accident in the darkroom produces a chemical concoction causing him and his dog to randomly switch back and forth between normal and X-ray (skeleton) versions of themselves. Drinking and cavorting ensues as he finds people able to see beyond his appearance and appreciate him for who he is, while inadvertently terrifying those who cannot.
• The Glorious Pool (1934). Set in the backdrop of the Volstead Act (Prohibition), two unrepentant reprobates are celebrating the 25th anniversary of the seduction which made the stylish Rex Pebble into an adulterer and his companion,Spray Summers, into his mistress. While their exasperating and alcoholic Japanese houseboy, Nakashima, plays jujitsu with the English language, the two slip into a swimming pool, the waters of which have been changed into a fountain of youth. Abandoning their clothes and modesty with their advanced years, the newfound youthfulness of their bodies puts into motion an evening of hijinks.
• The Passionate Witch (1941, published posthumously and completed by Norman H. Matson). A sequel to the novel, Bats in the Belfry (1942), is entirely by Matson, though sometimes attributed to Smith.

The Thorne Smith 3-Decker (Sun Dial Press, 1933) included The Stray Lamb, Turnabout and Rain in the Doorway.

During World War II, Skin and Bones, Turnabout, The Night Life of the Gods, The Passionate Witch, The Stray Lamb, The Bishop's Jaegers, The Glorious Pool, and Rain in the Doorway were all published in mass-market sized paperbacks by Armed Services Editions for distribution to the military.

Topper was made into a film of the same name starring Cary Grant as George Kerby, Constance Bennett as Marion Kerby, and Roland Young as Cosmo Topper. Two filmed sequels followed: Topper Takes a Trip, in 1939, and Topper Returns, in 1941. The latter film was not based on a book. Young reprised the role in the 1945 NBC radio summer replacement series The Adventures of Topper.^[6] The books were adapted into an American television series, Topper, beginning in 1953, with Leo G. Carroll as Cosmo Topper, and Robert Sterling and Anne Jeffreys as the ghosts. Seventy-eight episodes were made.

Night Life of the Gods was made into a film of the same name in 1935. It was cited in the book, Fantasy: The Best 100 Books.^[7]

Turnabout inspired both a film (1940) and a short-lived 1979 television sitcom starring Sharon Gless and John Schuck (canceled after six episodes),^[8] and to some extent the last broadcast episode of Star Trek: The Original Series, "Turnabout Intruder".^[9] Turnabout was one of the inspirations for Mary Rodgers' popular young adult novel Freaky Friday. As she was considering a new children’s book, following several picture books for young children, she remembered "that when I was fourteen, I’d read and loved a novel called Turnabout, by Thorne Smith. Vicious and hilarious, it was something I thought I could emulate in children’s fiction . . . for teens."^[10]

The Passionate Witch was produced in 1942 as the film I Married a Witch. It was one of the inspirations, along with Bell, Book and Candle, for the long-running TV series Bewitched.

• Joseph Leo Blotner, Thorne Smith: A Study in Popular Fiction (1951 dissertation, 197 pages with bibliography and appendices)
• Howard Steven Jitomer, Forgotten Excellence: A Study of Thorne Smith's Humor (1983 dissertation, 224 pages with bibliography)
• Peter Zilahy Ingerman, The World in Thorne Smith (1991 dissertation, 323 pages including appendices)

• Roland Young & Thorne Smith, Thorne Smith: His Life and Times (1934, Doubleday, Doran & Company, New York, 32 pp.)
• Anthony Slide, A Man named Smith: The Novels and Screen Legacy of Thorne Smith (2015, Albany, GA, 174 pp.)

• Haas, Irvin, comp. "[James] Thorne Smith [Jr.] 1893–1934." (American First Editions. Edited by Jacob Blanck.) The Publishers’ Weekly, 130 (28 November 1936): 2134.
• Sprague, Don. "Thorne Smith." Collecting Paperbacks? 3, no. 2 (May 1981), 19.
• Valone, Philip J., Jr. A Thorne Smith Source Book. N.p.: The author, 1982.
• Bleiler, E. F. The Guide to Supernatural Fiction. Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, [1983], pp. 464–66.
• Scheetz, George H., and Rodney N. Henshaw. "Thorne Smith." Bulletin of Bibliography, 41, no. 1 (March 1984): 25–37. Illustrated.
• [Ahearn, Patricia, and Allen Ahearn.] "Thorne Smith." Author Price Guide, No. [069], June 1986. 3 pp. Published by Quill & Brush; P. O. Box 5365; Rockville, Md. [Based on Scheetz, q.v.; credited.]
• [Smiley, Kathryn]. "A Thorne Smith Checklist." Firsts: Collecting Modern First Editions, 3, no. 4 (April 1993): 19. Illustrated.

English Wikisource has original works by or about:

Thorne Smith

• The Official Thorne Smith Website by Michael D. Walker
• Biography at Thorne Smith: Haunts & By-Paths

• Thorne Smith at the Internet Speculative Fiction Database
• Joseph Blotner collection on Thorne Smith, Kislak Center for Special Collections, Rare Books and Manuscripts, University of Pennsylvania

• LibraryThing author profile
• Works by Thorne Smith at Project Gutenberg
• Works by Thorne Smith at Faded Page (Canada)
• Works by or about Thorne Smith at the Internet Archive
• Works by Thorne Smith at LibriVox (public domain audiobooks)
• Thorne Smith, The Online Books Page, University of Pennsylvania
• Archive of Thorne Smith novels which are out of European copyright