Scott Bechtel Smith is an American author and screenwriter, who has published two novels, A Simple Plan and The Ruins. His screen adaptation of A Simple Plan earned him an Academy Award nomination. The screenplay won a Broadcast Film Critics Association Award and a National Board of Review Award.
Smith was born in Summit, New Jersey in 1965 and moved to Toledo, Ohio as a child. After graduating from Dartmouth College and from Columbia University with a Master of Fine Arts degree in Writing, he took up writing full-time.
His second novel, The Ruins, was also adapted into a film, released on April 4, 2008. Stephen King called it "[t]he best horror novel of the new century." King had also called A Simple Plan "simply the best suspense novel of the year."
In 2016 it was announced that TNT had greenlit a pilot for "Civil", a new TV series created by Smith about a second American Civil War following a hotly contested presidential election.