After the death of his mother in his teens, Smith and family moved to West De Pere, Wisconsin, to live with their paternal grandparents.

He applied for a fellowship at the University of Michigan and began graduate studies in botany in the fall of 1928 with the eminent mycologist Calvin H. Kauffman as his advisor.

Kauffman died before Smith completed his degree, so he continued his studies under professor Edwin Butterworth Mains, eventually earning his M.A.

His doctoral dissertation was entitled "Investigations of Two-spored Forms in the Genus Mycena", which was later published as a journal article.

During the course of 57 years of field work, Smith accumulated over 100,000 collections of fungal samples, and an extensive library of photographs.

In a work of this type the author should have recognized his duty to give his readers and users the best of modern classifications and nomenclature.

"[4]: 196 In another article, commenting about "the current low degree of accuracy developing in the literature on hallucinogenic mushrooms generally", Smith pointed out numerous errors in two current publications,[5][6] such as ambiguously written text, mistakes in citations, lack of scientific rigor in presenting arguments, unreliability of data due to inadequate sampling procedures, and inadequate searches of available literature.