William Gardner Smith, The Stone Face

Alexa Weik von Mossner (Universität Klagenfurt)

The Literary Encyclopedia. Volume 3.2.4: American (US) Writing and Culture: Postwar and Contemporary, 1945-present.
Vol. editors: Sofia Ahlberg (Uppsala University), Patrick Chura (University of Akron), Emory Elliott (University of California, Riverside), Dale Enggass (University of Utah), Christopher Hugh Gair (University of Glasgow), Matthew Hofer (University of New Mexico), Stephen E. Meats (Pittsburg State University), Kerry Myler (Birmingham Newman University), Justin Parks (UiT - The Arctic University of Norway), Nick Selby (University of East Anglia)

Dates

First circulation or publication 1963

Places

United States (Country of Origin)

Genres and Modes

Novel

Resources

Save to Bookshelf

William Gardner Smith's fourth and last novel,

The Stone Face

, was published by Farrar, Straus and Company in 1963. At this point Smith had been expatriated from the United States for over 12 years and was earning his living as a journalist for the French news service Agence France Press in Paris.

The Stone Face

was not a commercial success, but it received a number of favorable reviews in its time. In recent years, the novel has been lauded for its courageous engagement with the Algerian question in France, and for its historically accurate depiction of the notorious massacre of Algerians in Paris on October 17, 1961.

Set in the Paris of the early 1960s and grounded in both Smith's personal experience and careful journalistic research, The Stone Face tells the story of the African

Please log in to consult the article in its entirety. If you are a member (student of staff) of a subscribing institution (see List), you should be able to access the LE on campus directly (without the need to log in), and off-campus either via the institutional log in we offer, or via your institution's remote access facilities, or by creating a personal user account with your institutional email address. If you are not a member of a subscribing institution, you will need to purchase a personal subscription. For more information on how to subscribe as an individual user, please see under Individual Subcriptions.

1223 words

Citation: Weik von Mossner, Alexa. "The Stone Face". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 07 April 2009 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=26241, accessed 19 April 2024.]

Save this article