This is a biography of Harry Smith, the brilliant eccentric who transformed twentieth-century art and culture. He was an anthropologist, a filmmaker, a painter, a folklorist, a mystic, and a walking encyclopedia. He taught Patti Smith and Robert Mapplethorpe about the occult, swapped drugs with Timothy Leary, jammed with Thelonious Monk, lived with Allen Ginsberg, and received one of the first Guggenheim grants. He was always broke, frequently intoxicated, compulsively irascible, and unimpeachably authentic. Harry Smith was, in the words of Robert Frank, 'the only person I met in my life that transcended everything.'