Life & Wisdom Quote by Thorne Smith

A sly mission statement for the unserious novel, Thorne Smith frames authorship as loitering: he "wanders" into a plot, "pokes around" with characters, then "ambles off" before anyone can demand a lesson. The verbs do the heavy lifting. They shrink the grand machinery of Story into something closer to mischief and curiosity, the writer as flaneur rather than architect. That posture is a rebuke to the era's pious expectation that fiction should uplift, instruct, or at least file off its own rough edges.

Smith was a comic novelist of the Jazz Age, a period drunk on speed, sex, cocktails, and the sense that the old moral scaffolding had started to wobble. His best-known work sends normal people colliding with devils, fauns, and other embodiments of id. Against Prohibition-era earnestness and the lingering Victorian hangover, "leaving no moral proved" reads like a wink and a dare: if you're hunting for edification, you're in the wrong speakeasy.

The subtext is defensive and defiant at once. By preemptively admitting he won't "improve" you, Smith disarms the critic's favorite charge against light comedy: that it's frivolous. He turns frivolity into a principle. It's also a quiet claim about readers: maybe they don't need to be improved by a stranger with a typewriter; maybe what they need is permission to laugh at the rules and watch characters misbehave without a courtroom verdict at the end.

Even the humility is performative. Calling it casual doesn't mean the work is careless; it's a cultivated nonchalance, the craft of making chaos look easy.