author

Brainard Gardner Smith

1846–1930

Best known for practical books on public speaking, this late-19th-century teacher wrote with the clear, encouraging tone of someone who spent years helping students find their voice. His work blends classroom method with a strong belief that speaking well is a skill ordinary people can learn.

1 Audiobook

Eleven Possible Cases

Eleven Possible Cases

by Edgar Fawcett, Franklin Fyles, Anna Katharine Green, Henry Harland, Ingersoll Lockwood, Joaquin Miller, Kirk Munroe, Brainard Gardner Smith, Frank R. Stockton, Maurice Thompson, A. C. (Andrew Carpenter) Wheeler

About the author

Brainard Gardner Smith (1846–1930) was an American author and teacher of oratory whose surviving books center on speech, reading aloud, and public expression. Contemporary editions of Reading and Speaking identify him as an associate professor of elocution and oratory at Cornell University, and later as Upson Professor of Rhetoric and Oratory at Hamilton College.

His best-known work, Reading and Speaking: Familiar Talks to Young Men Who Would Speak Well in Public (1891), was written as both a college text and a general guide. Later editions expanded the audience beyond "young men," which gives a nice sense of how he tried to make instruction in speaking practical and widely useful.

Smith also appears in library records as the author of The Public Duty of Educated Men and as a contributor to the collaborative fiction volume Eleven Possible Cases. Reliable sources are sparse on his personal life, but the record that does remain shows a writer-teacher closely tied to higher education and to the idea that confident public speech could be taught step by step.