60 year old Rex Pebble inadvertently discovers that the fountain of youth happens to be in his back yard swimming pool. A magical statue of a nymph by the name of Baggage, an ornamental pool decoration, has playfully endowed the Pebble swimming pool with the power to reverse the aging process. Typical Thorne Smith fun ensues when Pebble, his wife, and his mistress take a dip and take 20 years off their lives. One of the funniest scenes concerns a book dealer wanting to display his old and rare to Pebble's unresponsive mistress. The Ron Howard movie Cocoon borrowed the theme from the Glorious Pool with many of the same humourous results.

The madcap story of a scientist who instigates a nocturnal spree with the Greek gods is arguably his most sparkling comedic achievement. Hunter Hawk has a knack for annoying his ultra respectable relatives. He likes to experiment and he particularly likes to experiment with explosives. His garage-cum-laboratory is a veritable minefield, replete with evil-smelling clouds of vapor through which various bits of wreckage and mysteriously bubbling test tubes are occasionally visible. With the help of Megaera, a fetching nine-hundred-year-old lady leprechaun he meets one night in the woods, he masters the art (if not the timing) of transforming statues into people. And when he practices his new witchery in the stately halls of the Metropolitan Museum of Art setting Bacchus, Mercury, Neptune, Diana, Hebe, Apollo, and Perseus loose on the unsuspecting citizenry of Prohibition-era New York the stage is set for Thorne Smith at his most devilish and delightful.

This gem of a book tells the tale of Mr. Lamb, an ordinary man who leads an ordinary life, until a chance encounter leads to him experiencing the world through the eyes of various animals. Thorne Smith again shows his mastery of the comic fantasy tale as Lamb lurches from one mishap to another, reeling from his wife's abandonment and the actions of his headstrong daughter and reveling in the new opportunities that his excursions into animal form provide.

Depressed and indifferent heir of a vast coffee import fortune, Peter Van Dyke finds his life and high society engagement turn upside down when his secretary, Josephine Duval determines that she will rescue him from his horrible fate by ruining him morally. After an amusing scandal involving a nude Peter Van Dyke, Miss Duval and an ill starred burglar in a coat closet, he finds himself cast adrift in a fog with a motley crew that includes a Bishop Waller of the Episcopal Church and a former nude model named Aspirin Liz. The enterprising party lands unceremoniously on the shores of one of New York's sauciest nudist colonies, and thus is the liberation of the coffee importer set in motion. One of Smith's few comic novels in which no element of the supernatural is featured.

"[Thorne Smith] created the modern American ghost.   A ghost with style and wit. A ghost that haunts us still."
--The New York Times

Thorne Smith is a master of urbane wit and sophisticated repartee. Topper, his best-known work, is the hilarious, ribald comedy on which the hit television show and movie (starring Cary Grant) were based.

It all begins when Cosmo Topper, a law-abiding, mild-mannered bank manager, decides to buy a secondhand car, only to find it haunted by the ghosts of its previous owners--the reckless, feckless, frivolous couple who met their untimely demise when the car careened into an oak tree. The ghosts, George and Marion Kerby, make it their mission to rescue Topper from the drab "summer of suburban Sundays" that is his life--and they commence a series of madcap adventures that leave Topper, and anyone else who crosses their path, in a whirlwind of discomfiture and delight.

As enchanting today as it was when first published in 1926, Topper has set the standard in American pop culture for such mischievous apparitions as those seen in The Ghost and Mrs. Muir, Heaven Can Wait, Beetlejuice, and Bewitched.

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James Thorne Smith Jr. (March 27, 1892 - June 21, 1934), was an American writer of humorous supernatural fantasy fiction.In The Night Life of the Gods Quirky inventor Hunter Hawk strikes gold when he invents a device that will enable him to turn living matter into stone and to reverse the process at will. After a chaotic field test he meets stunning 900-year-old Megaera who teaches him to turn stone into flesh. The two and a bunch of friends set their sights on New York City to bring the Greek gods of the Metropolitan Museum of Art to life. (wikipedia.org)

The American world of 1918 was certainly ready for farce. America had just been through its First World War; more deadly, it would lose many thousands to the Great Flu Pandemic 1919. And so it welcomed "Biltmore Oswald: The Diary of a Hapless Recruit" and "Out o' Luck: Biltmore Oswald Very Much at Sea," its sequel, published by Fredrick Stokes and Company. While editor he also published his poetry, which, like Edgar Allan Poe, he considered his true calling.