Clark Ashton Smith (January 13, 1893 – August 14, 1961) was an influential American writer of fantasy, horror, and science fiction stories and poetry, and an artist.

He achieved early recognition in California (largely through the enthusiasm of George Sterling) for traditional verse in the vein of Swinburne.

[1] Additional writers influenced by Smith include Leigh Brackett, Harlan Ellison, Stephen King, Fritz Lieber, George R. R. Martin, and Donald Sidney-Fryer.

Smith was one of "the big three of Weird Tales, with Robert E. Howard and H. P. Lovecraft",[2] though some readers objected to his morbidness and violation of pulp traditions.

His work is marked by an extraordinarily rich and ornate vocabulary, a cosmic perspective and a vein of sardonic and sometimes ribald humor.

Of his writing style, Smith stated: "My own conscious ideal has been to delude the reader into accepting an impossibility, or series of impossibilities, by means of a sort of verbal black magic, in the achievement of which I make use of prose-rhythm, metaphor, simile, tone-color, counter-point, and other stylistic resources, like a sort of incantation.

"[4] Smith was born January 13, 1893, in Long Valley, Placer County, California, into a family of English and New England heritage.

He spent most of his life in the small town of Auburn, California, living in a cabin built by his parents, Fanny and Timeus Smith.

After leaving formal education, he embarked upon a self-directed course of literature, including Robinson Crusoe, Gulliver's Travels, the fairy tales of Hans Christian Andersen and Madame d'Aulnoy, the Arabian Nights and the poems of Edgar Allan Poe.

[6] Smith later taught himself French and Spanish to translate verse out of those languages, including works by Gérard de Nerval, Paul Verlaine, Amado Nervo, Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer and all but 6 of Charles Baudelaire's 157 poems in The Flowers of Evil.

Smith briefly moved among the circle that included Ambrose Bierce and Jack London, but his early fame soon faded away.

[citation needed] A little later, Smith's health broke down and for eight years his literary production was intermittent, though he produced his best poetry during this period.

[9] In 1920 Smith composed a celebrated long poem in blank verse, The Hashish Eater, or The Apocalypse of Evil, published in Ebony and Crystal (1922).

[13] He published at his own expense a volume containing six of his best stories, The Double Shadow and Other Fantasies, in an edition of 1000 copies printed by the Auburn Journal.

The theme of much of his work is egotism and its supernatural punishment; his weird fiction is generally macabre in subject matter, gloatingly preoccupied with images of death, decay and abnormality.

Most of Smith's weird fiction falls into four series set variously in Hyperborea, Poseidonis, Averoigne and Zothique.

Hyperborea, which is a lost continent of the Miocene period, and Poseidonis, which is a remnant of Atlantis, are much the same, with a magical culture characterized by bizarreness, cruelty, death and postmortem horrors.

From 1933 to 1936, Smith, Howard and Lovecraft were the leaders of the Weird Tales school of fiction and corresponded frequently, although they never met.

And yet the depression found Smith without a job or viable occupation, unable to eke out a living as a poet, with girlfriends berating him for his lack of ambition.

After honeymooning at the Smith cabin, they moved to Pacific Grove, California, where he set up a household including her three children from a previous marriage.

Smith published most of his volumes of poetry in this period, including the aforementioned The Star-Treader and Other Poems, as well as Odes and Sonnets (1918), Ebony and Crystal (1922) and Sandalwood (1925).

In an homage to his friend, Lovecraft referred in "The Whisperer in Darkness" and "The Battle That Ended the Century" (written in collaboration with R. H. Barlow) to an Atlantean high-priest, "Klarkash-Ton".

Smith's weird stories form several cycles, called after the lands in which they are set: Averoigne, Hyperborea, Mars, Poseidonis, Zothique.

A selection of Smith's best-known tales includes: By this time his interest in writing fiction began to lessen and he turned to creating sculptures from soft rock such as soapstone.