Wilbur Smith
Wilbur Addison Smith was a Northern Rhodesian-born British-South African novelist specializing in historical fiction about international involvement in Southern Africa across four centuries.
He gained a film contract with his first published novel, When the Lion Feeds, which encouraged him to become a full-time writer. He went on to write three long chronicles of the South African experience, which became best-sellers. He acknowledged his publisher Charles Pick's advice to "write about what you know best"; his work focuses on southern African ways of life, with emphasis on hunting, mining, romance, and conflict.
By the time of his death in 2021, he had published 49 books. They have sold at least 140 million copies.
Early life
Smith was born in Ndola, Northern Rhodesia,, as was his younger sister Adrienne, to Elfreda and Herbert James Smith. He was named after the aviator Wilbur Wright.His father was a metal worker who opened a sheet metal factory and then created a cattle ranch on the banks of the Kafue River near Mazabuka, by buying up a number of separate farms. "My father was a tough man", said Smith. "He was used to working with his hands and had massively developed arms from cutting metal. He was a boxer, a hunter, very much a man's man. I don't think he ever read a book in his life, including mine".
As a baby, Smith was sick with cerebral malaria for ten days but made a full recovery. Together with his younger sister he spent the first years of his life on his parents' cattle ranch, comprising of forest, hills and savanna. On the ranch his companions were the sons of the ranch workers, small black boys with the same interests and preoccupations as Smith. With his companions he ranged through the bush, hiking, hunting, and trapping birds and small mammals. His mother loved books, read to him every night and later gave him novels of escape and excitement, which piqued his interest in fiction; however, his father dissuaded him from pursuing writing.
Education
Smith attended boarding school at Cordwalles Preparatory School in Natal. While in Natal, he continued to be an avid reader and had the good fortune to have an English master who made him his protégé and would discuss the books Smith had read that week. Unlike Smith's father and many others, the English master made it clear to Smith that being a bookworm was praiseworthy, rather than something to be ashamed of, and let Smith know that his writings showed great promise. He tutored Smith on how to achieve dramatic effects, to develop characters, and to keep a story moving forward.For high school Smith attended Michaelhouse, a boarding school situated in the KwaZulu-Natal Midlands. He felt that he never "fitted in" with the people, goals and interests of the other students at Michaelhouse, but he did start a school newspaper for which he wrote all the content, except for the sports pages. His weekly satirical column became mildly famous and was circulated as far afield as The Wykeham Collegiate and St Anne's.
Accountant
Smith wanted to become a journalist, writing about social conditions in South Africa, but his father's advice to "get a real job" prompted him to become a tax accountant."My father was a colonialist and I followed what he said until I was in my 20s and learned to think for myself", he said. "I didn't want to perpetuate injustices so I left Rhodesia in the time of Ian Smith."
He attended Rhodes University in Grahamstown, Cape Province, Union of South Africa and graduated with a Bachelor of Commerce in 1954. During the university holidays he worked in the gold mines and over the 1953–54 break with his friend Hillary Currey on a fishing boat based out of Walvis Bay and whalers. The next year, believing he was tough enough after having worked on a fishing boat, he took a Christmas vacation job on a whaling factory ship. He lasted four weeks. Following graduation, he joined the Goodyear Tires and Rubber Co in Port Elizabeth, where he worked until 1958. After selling their ranch his parents had retired to Kloof near Durban in South Africa. Unfortunately some bad investments forced Smith’s father to return to work. In partnership with his son he established in Salisbury the sheet metal manufacturing business of H. J. Smith and Son Ltd. However, the business ran into financial difficulties forcing Smith, who was by now 25 and divorced to take a job in 1963 as a tax assessor at the Inland Revenue Service in Salisbury.
Novelist
First novels
With spare time in the evening and access to plenty of pens and paper through his job at the Inland Revenue Service, Smith turned back to his love of writing. In April 1963, he sold his first story, "On Flinder’s Face", under the pen name Steven Lawrence to Argosy magazine for £70, twice his monthly salary. After a number of further acceptances, he wrote his first novel, The Gods First Make Mad, but received 20 rejections. Reviewing what he had written, Smith could see that he had a novel of 180,000 words: it was too long, badly written, had too many characters, and tried to express opinions on everything from politics and racial tension to women. Dejected he returned to work as an accountant.When he was 27 years old he received a telegram from his agent in London, Ursula Winant enquiring as to progress on his new novel. Encouraged by her expectation that he would be writing another novel, the urge to write once again overwhelmed him. He commenced work his next novel:
I wrote about my own father and my darling mother. I wove into the story chunks of early African history. I wrote about black people and white. I wrote about hunting and gold mining and carousing and women. I wrote about love and loving and hating. In short I wrote about all the things I knew well and loved better. I left out all the immature philosophies and radical politics and rebellious posturing that had been the backbone of the first novel. I even came up with a catching title, When the Lion Feeds.
When the Lion Feeds tells the stories of two young men, twins Sean and Garrick Courtney. The characters' surname was a tribute to Smith's grandfather, Courtney Smith, who had been a transport rider during the Witwatersrand gold rush in the late 1880s, had commanded a Maxim gun team during the Zulu Wars. He had also hunted elephant both as sport and to provide meat for his family. Courtney Smith had a magnificent moustache and could tell wonderful stories that had helped inspire his grandson.
After reading the manuscript Smith's agent rang Charles Pick, the deputy managing director of William Heinemann and convinced him to look at the novel. She also asked for an advance of £500, a guaranteed initial print run of 5,000 copies, and that it be published before Christmas. Impressed after just the first chapter, over the weekend Pick gave it to the company’s sales director Tim Manderson, who agreed that it should be published. Pick rang Winant and offered an advance of £1,000, with an initial print run of 10,000 copies. By the publication date Heinemanns had increased the print run to 20,000.
The book went on to sell well around the world. Charles Pick later became Smith's mentor and agent.
In 2012, Smith said When the Lion Feeds remained his favourite because it was his first to be published. Film rights were bought by Stanley Baker but no movie resulted. However, the money enabled Smith to quit his job in the South African taxation office, calculating he had enough to not have to work for two years.
I hired a caravan, parked it in the mountains, and wrote the second book", he said. "I knew it was sort of a watershed. I was 30 years of age, single again, and I could take the chance."
Smith's second published novel was The Dark of the Sun, a tale about mercenaries during the Congo Crisis. Film rights were sold to George Englund and MGM and it was filmed in 1968 starring Rod Taylor.
Smith did not originally envision the Courtney family from When the Lion Feeds would become a series, but he returned to them for The Sound of Thunder, taking the lead characters up to after the Second Boer War. At the time he was writing The Sound of Thunder in a caravan in the Inyanga mountains in November 1965 Ian Smith unilaterally declared Rhodesian independence. The resulting political violence forced Smith to return to the relative safety of Salisbury where he continued working on the novel during the day, while serving at night as a member of the reserve of the Rhodesian British South Africa Police. "I would get called out and have to get bodies of children from pit lavatories after they had been killed with pangas ", he recalled. As Smith didn’t share Ian Smith's views, he moved with his now pregnant second wife to Onrus River near Hermanus in South Africa.
Shout at the Devil was a World War I adventure tale which would be filmed in 1976. It was followed by Gold Mine, an adventure tale about the gold mining industry set in contemporary South Africa, based on a real-life flooding of a gold mine near Johannesburg in 1968.
The Diamond Hunters was set in contemporary West Africa, later filmed as The Kingfisher Caper. Around this time, Smith also wrote an original screenplay, The Last Lion which was filmed in South Africa with Jack Hawkins; it was not a success.
''The Sunbird''
Smith admitted to being tempted by movie money at this stage of his career but deliberately wrote something that was a complete change of pace, The Sunbird.It was a very important book for me in my development as a writer because at that stage I was starting to become enchanted by the lure of Hollywood. There had been some movies made of my books and I thought "whoa, what a way to go… All that money!" and I thought "hold on—am I a scriptwriter or am I a real writer?" Writing a book that could never be filmed was my declaration of independence. I made it so diffuse, with different ages and brought characters back as different entities. It was a complex book, it gave me a great deal of pleasure but that was the inspiration—to break free.
Eagle in the Sky was more typical fare, as was The Eye of the Tiger. Film rights for both were bought by Michael Klinger who was unable to turn them into movies; however, Klinger did produce films of Gold and Shout at the Devil.
Cry Wolf was a return to historical novels, set during the Italian invasion of Ethiopia in 1935. He then returned to the Courtney family of his first novel with A Sparrow Falls, set during and after World War I. Hungry as the Sea and Wild Justice were contemporary stories—the latter was his first best seller in the USA.