Gregory White Smith (October 4, 1951 – April 10, 2014) was an American biographer of both Jackson Pollock[1] and Vincent van Gogh.

[2] In addition to writing 18 books with Steven Naifeh, Smith was an accomplished musician, historic preservationist, art collector, philanthropist, attorney, and businessman who founded several companies including Best Lawyers,[3] which spawned an entire industry of professional rankings.

[1] The Philadelphia Inquirer called the book "Brilliant and definitive ... so absorbing in its narrative drive and so exhaustively detailed that it makes everything that came before seem like trial balloons.

"[6] Van Gogh: The Life, which Michiko Kakutani of The New York Times called "magisterial",[7] was published in 2011 with a companion website hosting over 6,000 pages of notes.

Then, talking out loud, as he did for the rest of his life, he would try different ways to articulate the same thought, clarifying the idea and giving the words more character and force.

'"[4] He graduated from Colby College in 1973, spent a year studying music in Europe on a Watson Fellowship, and then enrolled at the Harvard Law School.

After six months of clinical investigation, he was diagnosed with a hemangiopericytoma, a tumor so rare it landed him on the cover of the New England Journal of Medicine.

"[18] Smith worked as an associate attorney at the law firm of Morrison & Foerster and as an editor at the Free Press, where he published the Encyclopedia of Crime and Justice in 1983.

[4] Smith and Naifeh published Jackson Pollock: An American Saga in 1990, which won the 1991 Pulitzer Prize for Biography or Autobiography[19] and was also a finalist for the National Book Award.

[24] Time wrote: "Steven Naifeh and Gregory White Smith, whose 1989 biography of Jackson Pollock won the Pulitzer Prize, have written this generation's definitive portrait of the great Dutch post-Impressionist. ...

Their most important achievement is to produce a reckoning with van Gogh's occasional 'madness' that doesn't lose sight of the lucidity and intelligence – the profound sanity – of his art.

"[26] In addition to English, Van Gogh: The Life has been published in Dutch, German, French, Spanish, and Portuguese and is being translated into Italian, Polish, Russian, Chinese, Japanese, and Korean.

[27] Smith and Naifeh also wrote several how-to books to fund the writing of Pollock, including (with Michael Morgenstern), the best-seller How to Make Love to a Woman, which sold several million copies in 29 languages.

"[29] Smith also wrote two television series, one for PBS on the history of the Supreme Court with Archibald Cox and one for NBC on human behavior with Phil Donahue.

[32] In 1997, Smith told his story, as well as those of other patients conquering critical illnesses, in the book Making Miracles Happen, which Phil Donahue called "an inspiring gift to all of us who remain one cell away from the pathologies that would kill us ... Greg Smith's relentless and successful effort to save his own life is a medical story for the twenty-first century.

"[33] With Naifeh, he also founded Best Doctors, a company dedicated to helping others with undiagnosed or seemingly untreatable medical illnesses find the best medicine anywhere in the world.