author
Clifford Smyth
1866–1943
Best remembered as a literary editor and journalist, he also wrote adventure-filled historical and speculative fiction, including a lost-world tale set in the Andes. His career moved between newspapers, books, and literary circles in New York.
1 Audiobook
The Gilded Man: A Romance of the Andes
by Clifford Smyth
About the author
Born in New York City in 1866, Clifford Smyth built a career in journalism and literary editing. Sources consulted here describe him as a literary critic and as editor of the New York Times Book Review from 1913 to 1922.
He also wrote books of his own. The best-known today is The Gilded Man: A Romance of the Andes (1918), a novel noted by the Science Fiction Encyclopedia as a lost-race adventure involving a hidden Incan civilization. Library and archive records also connect him with a wider body of historical and biographical writing.
Archival sources show that Smyth was closely tied to American literary culture beyond his newsroom work. The New York Public Library holds his papers, and other records link him by marriage to the Hawthorne family. He died in 1943.