Malcolm H. Smith (1910–1966) was an American artist identified with the retro-futurist tradition. In the mid to late 1930s, Malcolm started working as a freelance artist for the various pulp publishers in Chicago. He did illustrations and paintings for mystery, romance, detective, western, and sci-fi pulps. He was, for a while, the art director at Ziff-Davis Publishing. At other times he worked in a Chicago-based artist's cooperative called Bendelow and Associates. Malcolm often used himself, his friends, and family members as models for his works. Throughout his career he became friends with many other artists, writers, scientists and engineers including: Virgil Finlay, Ray Paul, Edgar Rice Burroughs, and Wernher Von Braun. Malcolm H. Smith is considered by many Sci-Fi fans to be one of the founding fathers of this genre of art. He died in 1966 of lung cancer, and is buried in Huntsville, Alabama.