William Gardner Smith
FBI Files on William Gardner Smith
- Journalist, novelist, and prominent member of the expatriate community of postwar Paris noir, William Gardner Smith (1927-1974) was born and raised in Philadelphia but traveled widely in Europe and Africa after 1951. Fluent in French, he wrote and edited for the Agence France-Presse, the world’s oldest international news agency, when not authoring a string of English-language novels of black life: The Last of the Conquerors (1948), South Street (1954), and The Stone Face (1963). The FBI charted Smith’s progress beginning in 1951, playing havoc with his passport for several years. The Stone Face, a pioneering depiction of anti-Arab racism, can also be considered an “antifile” answering such FBI interference. Probably unfairly, Richard Wright considered Smith the true author of the so-called Gibson Affair that divided black Paris in the late 1950s.