author
Arthur Cosslett Smith
1852–1926
Best known for elegant, imaginative short stories, this Rochester lawyer-turned-writer published The Monk and the Dancer and The Turquoise Cup, works that earned warm praise in his day. His fiction often blends atmosphere, wit, and a taste for the dramatic.
1 Audiobook
The Turquoise Cup, and, the Desert
by Arthur Cosslett Smith
About the author
Born in 1852, Arthur Cosslett Smith was an American author and lawyer associated with Rochester, New York. Reliable archival sources identify him as the husband of Elisabeth Storer Atkinson Smith and remember him chiefly for two short-story collections, The Monk and the Dancer (1900) and The Turquoise Cup (1903).
Smith also had a legal education and career; biographical reference sources describe him as a Hobart graduate who later studied law at Columbia before practicing in Rochester. Even so, his literary reputation seems to have rested on a relatively small body of fiction, admired for its polish and storytelling charm.
He died in 1926. Contemporary notices and later archival summaries suggest that his fame had faded by the end of his life, but his stories have remained accessible through major digital libraries, giving modern readers a way back into a once well-regarded voice of turn-of-the-century American fiction.