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The life of Clark Ashton Smith (1893–1961)—poet, writer of fantastic fiction, painter, sculptor, and epistolarian—may be outwardly uneventful, as he spent the bulk of his sixty-eight years in the small California town of Auburn, in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada Mountains. But his diverse writings, and his relations with significant literary figures of his era, make a chronicle of his life of compelling interest.
A child prodigy, Smith read the dictionary from beginning to end and, as a teenager, wrote dozens of stories (including two of novel length) of adventure in the Middle East in the manner of the Arabian Nights. He then switched to poetry; under the influence of his mentor George Sterling, Smith published The Star-Treader and Other Poems (1912) at the age of nineteen and was hailed as the equal of Keats and Shelley.
Although Smith published several more poetry collections in the 1910s and 1920s, he was plagued with ill health, and he made little money for his poetic work. Incited by the need to support his ailing parents, Smith began writing fiction—horror, fantasy, and science fiction—at a prodigious date during the years 1929–35. These stories were published in Weird Tales, Wonder Stories, and other pulp magazines of the period. Smith was in part inspired by the example of his colleague H. P. Lovecraft in the production of these narratives.
But Smith’s fictional output dried up in the mid-1930s, as he became disillusioned with the restrictions of pulp fiction. He took to carving weird statuettes and resumed the writing of poetry. When August Derleth founded Arkham House in 1939, he soon began publishing collections of Smith’s tales. These volumes brought Smith some celebrity but little revenue, and he continued to struggle financially.
In 1954 Smith married Carolyn Dorman, moving into her house in Pacific Grove. He wrote little during his final years and did not live to see the publication of Selected Poems, which Derleth had commissioned in the 1940s. But his work was resurrected in the decades following his death, especially by such scholars as Donald Sidney-Fryer, Scott Connors, and Ron Hilger.
S. T. Joshi, who has spent decades in researching the life and work of Clark Ashton Smith, has written a comprehensive biography based on primary documents (especially the thousands of letters that Smith wrote to Sterling, Lovecraft, Derleth, Samuel Loveman, and other friends). Joshi examines in detail Smith’s complete literary output, referring to Smith as one of America’s greatest poets and perhaps the greatest prose-poet in the English language.
This long-overdue biography provides, for the first time, a detailed account of Smith’s life and assesses his place in literary history. All devotees of Clark Ashton Smith will wish to secure this volume.
