Celebrity medical expert Dr. Ian K. Smith is taking a turn in his career and promoting a new mystery he’s written based on his experience as one of a few Black members of an Ivy League secret society.
Smith’s new book The Ancient Nine is loosely based on his experiences as an undergraduate at Harvard University in the late 1980s and early 1990s and as a member of Delphic, one of the school’s secret “final” clubs. The experience affected Smith’s life so much that he decided to write about it, he said in an interview with Diverse.
The Ancient Nine was released mid-September.
“This book is a thriller because it’s based on the secrets that are buried within these clubs,” says Smith, 49. “It’s also a coming-of-age novel in which a young African-American kid from the other side of the tracks” experiences one of these clubs that in the past have mostly been closed to people of color.
“I think, first of all the book is fun – it takes you behind the doors of this extremely rare secret society,” Smith says. “But I also think, in a way it’s also a social commentary of what has happened and what is going on. I think that people will and the observations … to be relevant today.”
College secret societies have been around since the 1700s and have included Kennedys, Bushes and Rockefellers as members, their history dating back centuries and their traditions drawing in history. Groups like Skull and Bones at Yale, the Sphinx Society at Dartmouth, the Ivy Club at Princeton and Delphic at Harvard were traditionally open only to wealthy, White males, not on paper but most certainly in practice. Their existence was wrapped around secret traditions and ceremonies practiced at mansion-like headquarters, with stories that are reminiscent of the Illuminati. A rumor has floated around that members of Skull and Bones dug up the corpse of their founder.
But as times changed, so did these organizations, with a push from campuses starting in the 1960s to add women and people of color.
