H. Allen Smith, humorist and reporter par excellence of the foibles of human behavior, was in his heyday one of the most popular and productive writers in America. During a newspaper and freelance career of more than fifty years, he wrote thirty-seven books--several of them best-sellers--hundreds of articles in leading national magazines, and untold numbers of feature stories for a dozen American newspapers and the United Press wire service. Most of his writings consist of true-to-life stories and musings about celebrities, eccentrics, "ordinary mortals," and himself. He looked for the humorous in everything and everyone, and could deftly turn the observation into a funny, often barbed, story. He laughed at pomposity and delighted in deflating pretension wherever he found it. A master storyteller, Smith has often been called a modern-day Mark Twain. He was rarely off the best-seller lists in the 1940s, his books reportedly selling nearly 1.5 million...