Raymond J. Smith

Smith was born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. He graduated from the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee with a bachelor's degree in English. He received his PhD in English at the University of Wisconsin–Madison in 1960, where he met his future wife, fellow graduate student Joyce Carol Oates.^[1]

Smith taught 18th-century English literature at the University of Windsor and New York University until 1980, when he left teaching for editing and publishing. He and Oates co-founded The Ontario Review, a literary magazine, in 1974, with Oates serving as associate editor.^[2] The magazine's mission, according to Smith, was to bridge the literary and artistic culture of the U.S. and Canada: "We tried to do this by publishing writers and artists from both countries, as well as essays and reviews of an intercultural nature."^[3] In 1980, Oates and Smith co-founded Ontario Review Books, an independent publishing house.

In 2004, Oates described the partnership as "a marriage of like minds—both my husband and I are so interested in literature and we read the same books; he'll be reading a book and then I'll read it—we trade and we talk about our reading at meal times [...] it's a very collaborative and imaginative marriage".^[4]

Smith authored Charles Churchill,^[5] a critical study of the short-lived 18th-century British satirist. Smith also served as editor of a number of anthologies that appeared in The Ontario Review.

Smith died on 18 February 2008 (age 77), in Princeton, New Jersey, from complications of pneumonia.^[2] In April 2008, Oates wrote to an interviewer: "Since my husband's unexpected death, I really have very little energy [...] My marriage—my love for my husband—seems to have come first in my life, rather than my writing. Set beside his death, the future of my writing scarcely interests me at the moment."^[6]

The 13 December 2010 issue of The New Yorker carried Oates' "A Widow's Story," describing her last days with Smith.^[7]