Born in 1893 near Auburn, California, Clark Ashton Smith rarely left the area for the 1st 61 years of his life. Living the whole time in a wooden cabin with no running water or electricity, and only a wood stove for heat, he and parents scraped by on their meager earnings. Smith was mostly self-educated, saying he read the dictionary and encyclopedia front to back multiple times.
After the publication of his 1st poetry
collection, The Star-Treader, at the tender age of 19, Clark Ashton
Smith was lauded as the “Keats of the Sierras”.
Unfortunately, due to ill health, and financial hardship, he was unable
to capitalize on this success. He
intermittently published further poetry collections, never gaining the same
accolades for his poetry as before.
Since Smith wasn’t selling what little poetry he did write,
a friend encouraged him to try his hand at fiction. Between 1930-1938, Smith had published more
than 90 short stories. With 50 of his
stories and many of his poems gracing the pages of Weird Tales, he became good
friends with HP Lovecraft, and corresponded with him and Robert E Howard until
their deaths. The 3 of the authors
frequently shared aspects of their stories between them, with Smith inventing the
Book of Eibon, and Tsathoggua, the toad god, which Lovecraft ended up using in
a published story before Smith.
Smith’s writing has been described as florid or purple prose
by some. He utilized his extensive
self-taught vocabulary, weaving in poetic cadence and flare, to give the reader
an other-worldly experience. The themes
of his works focused on hubris, punishment, and loss, with a healthy dose of
morbidness and sensuality. He had many
different settings in which he worked: Hyperborea (ancient pre-ice age Earth,
not to be confused with R.E. Howard’s Hyboria), Zothique (far-flung future
Earth at the dying of the sun), Poseidonis (last continent of Atlantis),
Averoigne (haunted medieval France), modern day set around his hometown Auburn,
and multiple planets on which he set his science fiction stories. You can probably sense Smith’s theme of death
and finality just from the many of the setting descriptions. The Ballentine Adult Fantasy series published
4 collections of his work: Zothique, Hyperborea, Poseidonis, and Xiccarph (science
fiction stories).
Unfortunately, after Lovecraft, Howard and both of his
parents die in an 18-month period, Smith largely stopped writing. During his younger period of ill health, he
had turned to painting, drawing and sculpting, and now continued them as his main
creative endeavors. He had showings of
his art in New York, San Francisco and Paris, along with frequently showing
pieces in his local library and Auburn store front windows. Smith was one of the very few Weird Tales
authors who illustrated some of his own stories.
Finally, I live near Smith’s hometown, Auburn, California,
and produce a 2-page zine giving a more local view of Smith and his
environment. https://clark-ashton-smithery.blogspot.com/
https://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/ea.cgi?819
https://sf-encyclopedia.com/entry/smith_clark_ashton
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clark_Ashton_Smith
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