Melinda Knight Publishes Essay on William Gardner Smith

Melinda Knight’s essay, William Gardner Smith’s The Stone Face: A Novel Buried in Obscurity for Too Long, was just published in the collection American Writers in Paris: Then and Now (Palgrave Macmillan, 2025). William Gardner Smith’s The Stone Face was originally published in 1963, but it has been almost impossible to access a copy until July of 2021, when the New York Review of Books issued a paperback edition.

The novel tells the story of an African American expatriate, Simeon Brown, who initially finds his life in the early 1960s Paris to be a welcoming color-blind idyll after experiencing racial violence in the U.S. In trying to reconcile the positive experience of African American expatriates in France with Algerian oppression, Simeon finds himself considered White by perceived privilege, if not by skin color, and therefore complicit in French racism toward Algerians. He begins to lose his previously utopian outlook after he embarks on a journey to find out more about the Algerian War. The novel culminates in an account of the massacre of Algerian protesters by Parisian police on October 17, 1961. Of all the African American expatriate writers who lived in France in the 1960s, Smith alone actively opposed the French treatment of Algerians. Although it appears in a novel, the documentation in The Stone Face remains perhaps the most influential eyewitness account of the 1961 Paris massacre.