Quite casually I wander into my plot, poke around with my characters for a while, then amble off, leaving no moral proved and no reader improved.

Smith drank as steadily as his characters; his appearance in James Thurber's The Years with Ross involves an unexplained week-long disappearance. With racy illustrations these sold millions of copies in the 1930s and were equally popular in paperbacks of the 1950s. Smith was born in Annapolis Maryland the son of a Navy commodore and attended Dartmouth College.