Baptised in June 1723 in Kirkcaldy, a Fife port town of two thousand people. His father died a few months before he was born; he was raised by his mother, never married, and lived with her for most of his life. He entered Glasgow University at 14 under Francis Hutcheson, went to Oxford at 17 on a scholarship, and learned almost everything there by reading on his own. He returned to Glasgow to teach in 1751 and made his name in 1759 with The Theory of Moral Sentiments; in 1764 he resigned the chair to tutor a young duke, met Voltaire and the Physiocrats while in France, then shut himself away in Kirkcaldy for ten years and published The Wealth of Nations on 9 March 1776. He became Commissioner of Customs for Scotland in 1778 and died in Edinburgh on 17 July 1790.
1. February 1764: giving up the best chair in moral philosophy in Europe. He had won it at 28 and students travelled from across Europe to hear him. He exchanged it for the job of tutoring an 18-year-old duke, on the condition of a life pension of £300, payable whatever he did afterwards. At that point he had no draft of a second book. Leaving mid-term, he insisted on refunding the fees his students had already paid; when they refused, he pushed the money into their pockets. What he bought was not the money but ten years of owing no output to any employer.
2. 1776: writing the merchants in as the party to be guarded against. He was in Glasgow — a merchant city built on the tobacco trade, and his audience and patrons were in it. He still wrote that people of the same trade, once together, end up conspiring to raise prices, and that any legislative proposal coming from that class deserves long suspicion. He was not defending capital; he was building a firewall around the group he thought most likely to capture lawmaking. Posterity read the book backwards.
3. July 1790: burning sixteen volumes of manuscript. About a week before he died he pressed his executors, Joseph Black and James Hutton, to destroy the unfinished papers in front of him — probably including the history of law and government he had promised at the end of The Theory of Moral Sentiments. He wanted the boundary of his work drawn by himself, not reconstructed by others out of fragments.
Sources: John Rae, Life of Adam Smith (1895), chs. 12 and 28; Ian Simpson Ross, The Life of Adam Smith (2010); The Wealth of Nations, Book I, chs. 10 and 11.Summer 1764, Toulouse. He took the duke to southern France and found he knew nobody and his French was not good enough; there was nothing to do all day. On 5 July he wrote to Hume: "I have begun to write a book in order to pass away the time." Modern economics began as one man's side project against boredom. In Paris he then met Quesnay and the Physiocrats and picked up the piece he had been missing: an economy is a system with its own circulation, not a sovereign's balance sheet.
November 1776. Hume died, and Smith published a letter to the bookseller William Strahan describing how this famous sceptic went to his death calm, cheerful and without fear, calling him a man "as near to the idea of a perfectly wise and virtuous man, as perhaps the nature of human frailty will permit." At the time that amounted to claiming an unbeliever could die well. He later said this single sheet of paper brought him ten times more abuse than his violent attack on the whole commercial system of Britain. What he took from it was not caution but a sharper sense of where to stay silent: he never wrote publicly on religion again.
Sources: letter to David Hume, 5 July 1764; letter to William Strahan, 9 November 1776; letter to Andreas Holt, 26 October 1780.He did not write with a pen; he paced the room dictating to a secretary, rubbing his head against the wall as he talked — the wallpaper of his lodgings carried a greasy track worn by his hair. His thinking was oral, continuous, and had to be driven by physical movement.
He treated a published book as an unfinished one. The Theory of Moral Sentiments appeared in 1759 and he revised it through six editions, the last completed in the final months of his illness in 1790 — fourteen years after The Wealth of Nations. That last edition added an entire new part on virtue, including the passage on the "man of system" who moves the members of society like pieces on a chessboard. Most people update themselves by writing new books; he did it by rewriting old ones.
His absent-mindedness became local legend. He once walked out in his dressing gown and, lost in thought, covered some fifteen miles to Dunfermline; he once put bread and butter into a teapot and, having drunk the result, pronounced it the worst tea he had ever had. Once inside a problem, the external world went offline entirely.
Sources: John Rae (1895), chs. 5, 25 and 29; Dugald Stewart, Account of the Life and Writings of Adam Smith (1793).He wrote free trade, then went to work as a tariff official. In 1778 he took the post of Commissioner of Customs for Scotland at £600 a year — twice his ducal pension, which he did not give up. The work was hunting smugglers and enforcing exactly the mercantilist tariffs he had criticised line by line. He did it conscientiously: on taking office he went through his own wardrobe and found most of what he wore was contraband. You can call this the honesty of "a law on the books should be enforced"; you can also call it twelve final years of professional service to a system he had himself shown to be harmful. He never addressed the contradiction in public.
He opposed slavery, but on the wrong grounds. In the Lectures on Jurisprudence and The Wealth of Nations he argued that slave labour was more expensive and less efficient than free labour and therefore should not exist. The conclusion was right; the argument does not survive scrutiny. Caribbean plantation slavery was enormously profitable at the time — it was the source of the tobacco fortunes around him in Glasgow. Stake a moral evil on "it doesn't pay anyway" and the moment the efficiency arithmetic runs the other way, the conclusion collapses. On where that wealth came from he wrote with extraordinary restraint.
He saw the cost of the division of labour and offered a thin remedy. Book V of The Wealth of Nations says that a man whose whole life is spent performing a few simple operations "generally becomes as stupid and ignorant as it is possible for a human creature to become" — the darkest passage in the book, from the greatest advocate of the division of labour. His remedy was a single measure: state-funded elementary schooling. The diagnosis was structural human damage; the prescription was evening classes. The nineteenth-century factory confirmed the diagnosis, and confirmed that the prescription was not enough.
Sources: The Wealth of Nations, Book V, ch. 1, part III; Lectures on Jurisprudence (1762–63 student notes); Ian Simpson Ross (2010), ch. 21.1. Buy the time first, then worry about the output. His highest-leverage move was not writing a book but converting a respectable job into lifetime cash flow with no delivery attached — remove the review cycle first, then start long-horizon work. 2. Rewriting old work often beats opening new ground: for thirty years he maintained only two systems and kept them alive through six revisions. 3. Never rest a moral conclusion on an efficiency argument — he opposed slavery by arguing it "didn't pay"; the same trap waits in today's arguments about AI and automation, where "the machine does it worse" will not hold for long. 4. You will be read as the thing you did not write: the invisible hand appears three times in his entire corpus and became his whole label. 5. The force of the prescription has to match the force of the diagnosis, or you have simply handed the problem to the next century.