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:
“We can never safely exceed the actual facts in our narratives. Of pure invention, such as some suppose, there is no instance. To write a true work of fiction even is only to take leisure and liberty to describe some things more exactly as they are.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“A predilection for genre fiction is symptomatic of a kind of arrested development.”
—Thomas M. Disch (b. 1940)