In Fiction
Smith is one of four characters (and the only one based on a real person) from whose point of view Gore Vidal's novel of the period, Hollywood, is told. He is portrayed as a business-savvy but weak-willed and sycophantic follower of Harding and Daugherty, and it's speculated that his death might have been a murder used to cover up the Ohio Gang's crimes.
Roy Hoopes' novel Our Man in Washington also speculats that Smith might have been murdered as part of a coverup.
Smith is played by Ed Jewett in season 3 of Boardwalk Empire. When Harry Daugherty's office comes under investigation for its connections to bootleggers, Smith becomes increasingly paranoid. Daugherty comes to see Smith as a loose end and sends fellow Ohio Gang member, Gaston Means, to kill him. Means plans to kill Smith in his sleep but is unable to surprise him leading to an awkward confrontation where Smith kills himself.
Read more about this topic: Jess Smith
Famous quotes containing the word fiction:
“... all fiction may be autobiography, but all autobiography is of course fiction.”
—Shirley Abbott (b. 1934)
“If one doubts whether Grecian valor and patriotism are not a fiction of the poets, he may go to Athens and see still upon the walls of the temple of Minerva the circular marks made by the shields taken from the enemy in the Persian war, which were suspended there. We have not far to seek for living and unquestionable evidence. The very dust takes shape and confirms some story which we had read.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)