author
Arthur Cosslett Smith
1852–1926
Known for elegant, atmospheric short stories, this Rochester lawyer-turned-author won praise around the turn of the twentieth century for tales collected in The Monk and the Dancer and The Turquoise Cup.
1 Audiobook
The Turquoise Cup, and, the Desert
by Arthur Cosslett Smith
About the author
Born in New York in 1852, he built a career as both a lawyer and a writer. Sources connected to the Sibley Watson Digital Archive describe him as the husband of Elisabeth Storer Atkinson Smith and note that he was closely linked to Rochester literary and family circles.
He is best remembered for two short-story collections, The Monk and the Dancer (1900) and The Turquoise Cup (1903), which were noted for their polished, imaginative storytelling. His work also survives through public-domain editions, including The Turquoise Cup, and, the Desert.
Although not widely read today, he once enjoyed a strong reputation as a short-story writer, and his fiction still offers a glimpse of the refined magazine-literary world of his era. He died in 1926.