Bradley Reed Smith was born in South Central Los Angeles in 1930. He is a combat veteran of the Korean War (7th Cavalry) where he was twice wounded. He has served as a deputy sheriff in Los Angeles County. He has worked as a railway brakeman, as a merchant seaman, and in various construction trades. He was once a bullfighter in Mexico, and he was a freelance writer in Vietnam during the Tet Offensive. As a bookstore proprietor in Hollywood in the early 1960s, Smith was prosecuted – and convicted – for selling Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer. He is the founding director of the Committee for Open Debate on the Holocaust (CODOH). A Personal History of Moral Decay is his fourth book.
Reading Bradley Smith is about treasuring good writing, regardless of whether you deem the author’s opinions worthy of your moral rubber stamp; see also Céline. But if you must have a moral, Smith earned every phrase the hard way.
--Ann Sterzinger, Taki's Magazine
Like Camus’ Mersault, confronting a howling mob, or Beckett’s Malone, dying alone, Bradley Smith is at last content with his life. This collection of his writing give the reader the opportunity to learn how a man at the center of so much controversy and outright hatred can find the air so much sweeter just exactly right there.
--James O'Meara, Counter-Currents
Smith writes with an understated simplicity, the argot of a man with little education but a lot of brains. His prose is raw and functional, conveying the anarchy of war, the raunchiness of his comrades, the sincerity of his lovers with honesty and conviction.
--Matt Forney, author of Confessions of an Online Hustler
![]({"https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/51A7-f1GTAL._SX319_BO1,204,203,200_.jpg":[321,499],"https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/51A7-f1GTAL._SY344_BO1,204,203,200_.jpg":[223,346]})
