Zadie Smith made a huge splash in 1997 when, as a college student, she received one of the largest advances in British history for her novel White Teeth. Since then, Smith has published four major novels, a volume of essays, and many short stories. She has become a college professor, an award-winner, and an influential critic of both literature and the current political scene. Readers of Zadie Smith will learn about how insecure and outside of society she felt as a child and young woman, and how that very sense of being an outsider transformed her into the writer of clarity she is today.