In spite of a lack of contemporary critical recognition for his work, journalist, novelist, and editor William Gardner Smith is linked to the black social protest novel tradition of the 1940s and the 1950s, which includes writers such as Richard Wright, Chester Himes, Willard Motley, and Ann Petry. Addison Gayle credits Smith with turning away from "much of the deterministic thought of his predecessors." His protagonists are fully sympathetic, and his third book, South Street (1954), is one of the first black militant protest novels.

Smith was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, on 6 February 1927 to Edith Smith. In 1934 his mother married Douglass Stanley Earle, and this marriage produced three children--two daughters, Phyllis and Sydney, and a son, Douglass. Smith, the eldest, delighted in the care of his half sisters and brother, although he disliked his stepfather.

As a child living in the South Philadelphia ghetto during the 1940s, a recurring...