Arthur D. Howden Smith
American historian, writer and journalist
Arthur Douglas Howden Smith (1887–1945) was an American historian and novelist.
Life
Smith was born in New York. In 1907, at the suggestion of writer Albert Sonnichsen, he got in touch with the Internal Macedonian Revolutionary Organization (VMRO), traveled to the Balkans, and spent two months illegally in the region of Nevrokop, eastern Macedonia, with an armed band of the Organization. His experiences he recounted in 1908 in the book Fighting the Turk in the Balkans, describing the revolutionary struggle in Macedonia. On returning to the United States, Smith became a reporter for the newspaper the New York Evening Post.
Work
Smith began writing by contributing fiction to pulp magazines; his main market was Adventure. Smith also wrote fiction for Blue Book.
For Adventure, Smith wrote sea stories about the adventures of Captain McConaughy. There were also historical swashbucklers about a Viking, Swain, living in Medieval Orkney and engaged in a terrible feud with the witch Frakork and her blood-thirsty grandson Olvir Rosta – which Smith based on historical information provided by the Orkneyinga saga. The Swain saga has since been reprinted in four volumes by DMR Books.
“Arthur D. Howden Smith” enters the record as american historian, writer and journalist. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Arthur, Howden and Smith can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Biographical claims are most persuasive when dates, appointments and relationships can be traced to records created close to the events described. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 5, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q4798397. VIAF identifies the subject as 62558863. The Library of Congress control number is n84140791. 3 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1887, 1945, 1907 and 1908.
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This entry incorporates text from “Arthur D. Howden Smith” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.