I think I may have discovered yet another lost Lovecraft correspondent, and another Barlow mistranscription of a name on the 1937 correspondence addresses of H.P. Lovecraft…

   “Horatio L. Smith, 36 Dodd St, Montclair NJ.”

This is likely to be Horatio E[lwin] Smith (1886-1946) of Columbia University. Montclair is a leafy suburb some 15 miles from Columbia. He wrote on Poe, and was a literary academic at Brown University 1926-c.1934.

Smith (above) studied under John Erskine (A Memory of Certain Persons, p.141, noted in passing) at John Hopkins, where he took a LL. D. [Doctor of Laws in English].

Horatio E. Smith was the author of the article “Poe’s Extension of His Theory of the Tale” in the 1st August 1918 edition of Modern Philology. This is possibly how his name first came to the attention of H.P. Lovecraft. If so, Lovecraft would have no doubt remarked on a name so strikingly similar to a major writer of Poe’s time…

   “During Poe’s lifetime, one of the most popular English writers of poetry, essays, novels and tales was Horace or Horatio Smith (1779-1849).” (Burton R. Pollin, “Figs, Bells, Poe, and Horace Smith”, Poe Newsletter, June 1970).

The history of the French dept. at Amherst College supplies a useful academic biography that confirms my initial research…

   “Horatio Elwin Smith, a 1908 graduate of the College, was hired to teach French literature [circa 1919]. /their footnote: Smith held a doctorate from Johns Hopkins that was awarded in 1912./ He had taught at Yale for the previous six years [living at 837 Orange St] and specialized in the analysis of nineteenth-century texts. He wrote articles on Stendhal, Balzac, Sainte-Beuve and Poe, as well as a book on the literary criticism of Pierre Beyle [his thesis]. In addition, he wrote a textbook on advanced French Composition. Under Smith the curriculum in French would see its first course in “Modern French Criticism,” which was dedicated to the writings of Sainte-Beuve, Taine, and Renan. Smith would leave Amherst in 1926 to become Chair of Romance Languages at Brown University [Providence], before assuming the same title a few years later [circa 1934] at Columbia University, where he became the editor of [the academic journal] Romanic Review [the Columbia University journal for the study of Romance literatures, seemingly serving as editor for the 1937-1947 issues].

The move to Brown University in 1926 suggests that, if Lovecraft had not noted Smith’s 1918 Poe article in 1918 or 1919, he could have learned of Smith later via a newspaper or journal profile of the incoming professor.

Smith also published a book in French “La fortune d’une oeuvre de jeunesse de Stendhal en Amerique” (1927). The Amherst College French dept. history notes he was… “named ‘Chevalier de la Legion d’Honneur’ by the French government.” Seemingly this was for his work with the YMCA in France during the First World War.

By 1942 Smith was noted as… “Prof. Horatio E. Smith, chairman of the Columbia department of Romance languages”, and was on the Modern Language Association’s Commission on Trends in Education. His widely cited reference work the Columbia Dictionary of Modern European Literature appeared after his death, in 1947. It had notable early research summaries on the writers of Dada and surrealism.

One wonders what happened to Smith’s papers and correspondence in 1946? Still preserved in some dusty boxes at Columbia, perhaps?