[3] The son of John Lewis and Margaret (Wiseman) Simak, he attended the University of Wisconsin–Madison and then taught in the public schools until 1929.

His first contribution to the literature was "The World of the Red Sun", published by Hugo Gernsback in the December 1931 issue of Wonder Stories with one opening illustration by Frank R.

At first, as in the 1939 serial novel Cosmic Engineers, he wrote in the tradition of the earlier "super science" subgenre that E. E. "Doc" Smith perfected, but he soon developed his own style, which is usually described as gentle and pastoral.

City, a fix-up novel from this period based on short stories with a common theme of mankind's eventual exodus from Earth, won the International Fantasy Award.

[12]: 27  Crusty individualistic backwoodsman characters often appear - for example, Hiram Taine, the protagonist of "The Big Front Yard".

Thus in City our Earth is overrun by ants, but the intelligent dogs and the remaining humans escape to other worlds in the time stream.

In "All the Traps of Earth", a 600-year-old robot, a family retainer who earned the name Richard Daniel, is considered chattel to be reprogrammed and lose all its memories.

Daniel gains the ability to see and fix problems in anything – a ship, a robot, a human – telekinetically, but is still drifting and hunted as chattel.

The religious theme is often present in Simak's work, but the protagonists who have searched for God in a traditional sense tend to find something more abstract and inhuman.

Simak's short stories and longer novellas range from the contemplative and thoughtfully idyllic to pure terror, although the punch line is often characteristically understated, as in "Good Night, Mr. James" and "Skirmish'".

Way Station is, in the midst of all of the science fiction paraphernalia, a psychological study of a lonely man who has to make peace with his past and finally manages to do so, but not without personal loss.

Other traditional science fiction themes in Simak's work include the importance of knowledge and compassion, such as in "Immigrant" and "Kindergarten".

For example, in the novelette "So Bright the Vision" (1968), he portrayed artificial intelligence writing software similar to ChatGPT, but focusing on socio-psychological issues.

For example, in Special Deliverance, the humans are stalked by The Wailer, which turns out to be a huge wolf-like creature that bellows an infinitely sad howl.

After explaining what themes he avoids – no large-scale alien invasions, no space wars, no empire sagas – he states: Overall, I have written in a quiet manner; there is little violence in my work.

In general, I believe we do, and perhaps an important one.From 1950 to 1986 Clifford Simak wrote more than 30 novels and four non-fiction works, with Way Station winning the 1964 Hugo Award.

[2] One more short story, "I Had No Head and My Eyes Were Floating Way Up in the Air", had been written in 1973 for publication in Harlan Ellison's never-published anthology The Last Dangerous Visions and was first published posthumously in 2015.

"[13] The Science Fiction Writers of America made Simak its third SFWA Grand Master in 1977, after Robert Heinlein and Jack Williamson.

[3][4] In 1987 the Horror Writers Association named him one of three inaugural winners of the Bram Stoker Award for Lifetime Achievement, with Fritz Leiber and Frank Belknap Long.