20 Facts About Paul Jordan-Smith

Paul Jordan-Smith was an American Universalist minister who worked as a writer, lecturer and editor.

Paul Jordan-Smith's father, John Wesley Smith, was a Southern Methodist minister who dreamed of starting a college and invested in land in Dade County, Georgia, outside Chattanooga, Tennessee.

Paul Jordan-Smith graduated from US Grant University in Chattanooga, Tennessee in 1906.

Paul Jordan-Smith served briefly as a minister at Universalist churches in Unionville, Missouri, and Kansas City and developed a reputation as an outstanding lecturer on science and religion.

Paul Jordan-Smith moved to Chicago in 1910, where he worked at the Independent Religious Society and later got a job as a minister and ran a settlement house.

Paul Jordan-Smith enrolled part-time in graduate classes at the University of Chicago and developed a broad acquaintance among both literary and social activist circles, including lawyer Clarence Darrow, activist Emma Goldman, novelist John Cowper Powys, editor and publisher Margaret Anderson, writer Floyd Dell, Chicago Little Theatre founder Maurice Browne, and bookseller George Millard.

Paul Jordan-Smith was hired as a substitute minister of the First Unitarian Church of Berkeley after Arthur Maxson Smith resigned when his wife, the heiress Sarah Bixby Smith, caught him having an affair and sued for divorce.

Paul Jordan-Smith married Sarah on March 30,1916, immediately after her divorce came through.

Paul Jordan-Smith taught courses on English and American literature at the new University of California Extension program in Los Angeles.

Paul Jordan-Smith served for a time as the educational director of the Walt Whitman School, a progressive secondary school founded in East Los Angeles in 1919.

Paul Jordan-Smith eventually left Sarah for his cousin Dorothy and the couple divorced.

Paul Jordan-Smith was a great admirer of the 17th-century British author and scholar Robert Burton.

Paul Jordan-Smith co-edited the first all-English translation of Burton's magnum opus, The Anatomy of Melancholy, following it up with Bibliographica Burtoniana, which included both a study of Burton and a scholarly key to the sources Burton used in The Anatomy of Melancholy.

Paul Jordan-Smith collected books relating to Burton, and after Sarah died, he gave the core of his collection to the Claremont Colleges Library in her memory.

Paul Jordan-Smith wrote one of the first books on James Joyce, A Key to the Ulysses of James Joyce.

Paul Jordan-Smith dedicated this book to Powys, who had persuaded him in 1922 to buy a then-rare and expensive first edition of Ulysses during one of Powys's stays at Erewhon, which they then read together.

Paul Jordan-Smith served for a time in the 1940s and 1950s as the literary critic for the Los Angeles Times.

Paul Jordan-Smith's papers are housed in the UCLA Library Special Collections.

Paul Jordan-Smith may be best known today for a hoax that he initiated in 1924, in part out of a dislike of modern art that was evident as far back as 1913, when he saw the traveling version of the notorious Armory Show at the Art Institute of Chicago.

Paul Jordan-Smith's canvases were well received on the whole until he got tired of sustaining the role and outed himself to a Los Angeles Times reporter in 1927.