Smith's memoirs describe his experiences growing up on an Army base outside St. Louis in the years between the two world wars. Because Smith's father was an enlisted man, Smith was subject to the rigid discipline and hierarchy of military life at that time. This coming-of-age story evokes both a time gone by and a young writer's discovery of language, sexuality, and all the possibilities that the world might hold for him. In recalling his participation in a high school choral contest, Smith hints at his growing discovery of his own powers: "I had the odd, pleasing, and yet somehow terrifying sensation that while my voice was now only one among many, some day it would rise above the others and be heard in the vast realm represented by those stone towers and green lawns."

Washington Post reviewer Stephanie Vaughn declared "The life of the military child has been so little documented that it is a pleasure to see it so fully handled in the poet William Jay Smith's memoir . . . and is for the most part a balanced and beguiling account of an unusual life lived in a little-known subculture." "Mr. Smith has written a charming portrait of this forgotten world," wrote Paul Zweig in The New York Times Book Review. "He evokes the sharp clink of the training rifles and the picnics on rough brown Army blankets overlooking the equally brown and muddy Mississippi. He evokes small things, like the V-shaped heavy cardboard his father hooked around the buttons on his uniform preparatory to buffing and polishing them. And he evokes the sometimes squalid living quarters, such as a two-room shack perched over a sinkhole, where he lived when he was six. . . . Mr. Smith himself is by no means absent, but we learn about him less in what he tells us about himself than by seeing what he sees and evokes with such intense simplicity." 

American poet William Jay Smith was appointed Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress from 1968 to 1970.

Army Brat: A Memoir

Biographies & Memoirs

Smith, William Jay

Memoirs

Penguin??Books

Ho for a Hat!

A young boy and his dog observe and try on a variety of hats throughout history.

Children's Books

Little,Brown & Co

A rhythmic celebration of hats, written in lively verse, about a young boy and his dog who try on real and fantastical hats throughout history. The author's other collections of nonsense verse include Laughing Time and Puptents and Pebbles.

Ho for a Hat

Little, Brown Young Readers

A young boy and his dog observe and try on a variety of hats throughout history

Literature & Fiction

Ho For A Hat

Little, Brown, US

Contains nonsense poems on a variety of topics.

Laughing Time: Collected Nonsense

Farrar. Straus & Giroux

A revised edition of a beloved collection of wacky poems and lopsided limericks. 
"This expanded reissue...containing one third new material, is sure to tickle the funnybones of a new generation." --Kirkus Reviews

Farrar, Straus and Giroux (BYR)

An Arrow in the Wall: Selected Poetry and Prose

Voznesenskiĭ, Andreĭ

Reeve, F.D.

Vintage/Ebury (A Division of Random House Group)

Laughing time: Nonsense poems

Poetry

Delacorte Press\Seymour Lawrence

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Books by Smith, William Jay