Ed Smith knows about love. But the 28th Ward alderman didn’t put his wisdom into words until he started his first romance novel.
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
Smith was the youngest of 12 children born to sharecroppers in Kirby, Mississippi. His father died when he was two, but his mother pushed him to work hard through school. Ever since graduating from high school Smith wanted to write, but “I just didn’t know how to do it,” he says. “I was not disciplined enough. I had not read enough stuff to write. I could not formulate the way you should formulate.” He got his MA in inner-city studies at Northeastern Illinois University in 1970, and over the next few decades, while first floundering and then triumphing in ward politics, he took in Steinbeck, Hemingway, Tennessee Williams, and Erskine Caldwell.
After losing four consecutive races for the 28th Ward aldermanic seat, Smith finally won in 1983, as part of Harold Washington’s independent sweep. Six years later, “I thought I was in pretty good shape to start doing some things and I should start putting some ideas together and thinking about some of the stuff I needed to write. What it is this segment I want to reach, and what it is they want to read. So one day I picked up the pencil and said, ‘I think I’m gonna.’”
Smith says Turow hooked him up with a New York editor, who eviscerated the manuscript but gave him the constructive criticism he needed to get it in shape. The next time he sent it out–to a small downstate publisher who’d already rejected it once–it was accepted.
