Nationality American Role Author | Name Larry Smith | |
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Occupation Non-fiction writer, editor Notable works "Not Quite What I Was Planning","Six-Word Memoirs on Love & Heartbreak" Books Things Don't Have to Be Complicated Profiles | ||
Larry Smith (born September 17, 1968) is an American author and editor, and publisher of Smith Magazine. He is best known for developing the best-selling book series "Six-Word Memoirs", a literary subgenre that took on a life of its own in popular culture as publications began holding reader contests and publishing the results. The form has been described as "American haiku." Smith credits Ernest Hemingway's reputed shortest story, "For sale: baby shoes, never worn”, with inspiring the viral literary movement.
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Background and early career
Smith grew up in New Jersey, the son of Burlington attorney Louis Smith and his wife Carol, a clinical social worker. He graduated from the University of Pennsylvania.
He worked as a founding editor of the magazine P.O.V. and editor-in-chief of its sister publication, Egg, as well as an editor of Might magazine with Dave Eggers. He was also managing editor of the news service AlterNet and editor of the city guide network, Boulevards.
Smith also worked as executive editor of Yahoo! Internet Life, editor at ESPN The Magazine, and articles editor at Men's Journal. His writing has appeared in The New York Times, Popular Science, Men’s Health, Salon, Slate, as well as other places.
In 2004, Smith's then-fiancée, Piper Kerman, served a 13-month sentence at the Federal Correctional Institution, Danbury, Connecticut, the result of a 1998 arrest for drug-related offenses committed about five years prior. Smith visited her in prison almost every week, and wrote about the experience in the New York Times. Kerman later wrote a memoir about the experience, Orange Is the New Black: My Year in a Women's Prison, which was subsequently made into a television show by Netflix productions, in which Smith's analogue ("Larry Bloom") is played by Jason Biggs.
Smith Magazine and "Six Word Memoirs"
On January 6, 2006, National Smith Day, Smith co-founded the online Smith Magazine with Tim Barkow.
Two years later, Smith's book, Not Quite What I Was Planning: Six-Word Memoirs by Writers Famous and Obscure, co-edited by Rachel Fershleiser, was selected as a Top 100 Editors' Pick by Amazon in 2008 and became a New York Times bestseller. Smith and Fershleiser went on to co-edit three more books in the series, including Six-Word Memoirs on Love & Heartbreak, I Can't Keep My Own Secrets: Six-Word Memoirs by Teens Famous & Obscure, and It All Changed in an Instant: More Six-Word Memoirs by Teens Famous & Obscure, all published by Harper Perennial.