C. W. Smith (writer)

C. W. Smith (born 1940) is a novelist, short-story and essay writer who serves as a Dedman Family Distinguished Professor in the Department of English at Southern Methodist University.

[1] Smith has said that his goal since beginning his first novel has been "to document in a dramatic fashion the cultural conflicts of the American Southwest as well as the universal, existential dilemmas that arise from being human regardless of place and time.

"[2] In pursuit of that goal, his second novel, set in West Texas among oil field workers and small-town citizens, sought to portray the lives of young people trapped in circumstances too small for their aspirations.

The novel was reviewed widely with largely, though not universally, positive notices: "Smith's portrait of a troubled young man searching for himself he knows not where...is alive, funny, sad, and as real as it can be.

When the family returned to Texas, Smith became a reporter and film critic for The Dallas Times-Herald and subsequently began teaching at Southern Methodist University.

His third novel, The Vestal Virgin Room (Atheneum, 1983), focused on a pair of married itinerant musicians, Mid-Westerners, whose efforts to secure fame in Las Vegas results in a strain in a marriage already under stress due to the loss of their only child.

"[7] "Critic Bruce Allen, writing in USA Today, said that "Buffalo Nickel is a delightful rarity: an old-fashioned 'good read' which tells the life story of a likable and interesting character who truly grows and changes....

The novel is a roomy, agreeably slow-paced picaresque whose serious themes (the abrading of Indian culture, the gradual disappearance of space and wilderness) emerge with haunting clarity from a prose that continuously suggests and dramatizes, never once breaking into sermon.

In 1994, Texas Christian University Press began its long association with Smith's works through the publication of his short-story collection, Letters From the Horse Latitudes.

Smith's next novel, Hunter's Trap (TCU Press, 1996), was designed to be an oblique sequel to the earlier Buffalo Nickel and the second part of a projected trilogy treating the theme of Native American assimilation into Anglo-European culture after the defeat of the Plains tribes by the U.S. military in the last quarter of the 19th century.

"[12] Smith returned to more contemporary settings in his subsequent novel, Understanding Women (TCU Press, 1998), a coming-of-age story that takes place in the late 1950s when its sixteen-year-old protagonist and narrator leaves his home in Dallas to spend a summer working for his uncle in the oil fields.

[14] Gabriel's Eye (Winedale Publishing, 2001) utilizes Smith's intimate knowledge of contemporary Dallas to focus upon the affair between a female teacher and her student at a local performing arts high school.

The novel is a coming-of-age story for a young man from a Dallas blue-collar suburb who allows his eleven-year-old stepsister to run away with him, setting off an Amber Alert that divides their newly married parents.

Smith has received just about every literary award the state and region bestow, and his latest work, the sprightly and wise Steplings, will no doubt add to his reputation as a Lone Star star….