Smith is linked to the black social protest novel tradition of the 1940s and the 1950s,[1] a movement that became synonymous with writers such as Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, Willard Motley, and Ann Petry.

Smith, who spoke fluent French, was a frequent contributor and guest on radio and television programs in France, where he was considered an expert on the political struggle, civil unrest, and racial tension in the United States during the late 1960s and early 1970s.

There they became part of a large African-American community of artists and writers living in Paris including, most prominently, Richard Wright, James Baldwin, and Chester Himes among others.

Increased financial burdens, his wife's difficulty learning a foreign language, and their struggles as artists in the displaced milieu of a community far from family and home, led to the couple's divorce.

In 1954, Smith's situation improved with the release of his third novel, South Street (inspired by his childhood in the black neighborhoods and ghettoes of Philadelphia), and his hiring by the Agence France-Presse (AFP).

Kristin Ross, in her book May '68 And Its Afterlives, points out that The Stone Face is one of the earliest published eyewitness accounts (albeit in a fictionalized format) of the Paris massacre of 1961.

By the early 1960s, as a black American working in a foreign land and witness to injustice on two continents, the stakes were raised for Smith in the composition of this novel.

In this novel and his subsequent journalistic writing and reportage, Smith testified to the social, political, and cultural happenings of his adopted country as a way to explore and address everyday racism in the United States.

In France, Smith was considered an expert on the racial situation in the United States, especially after he published a report in 1967 on the revolts within American black ghettos.