About Clark Ashton Smith
Clark Ashton Smith was an influential American writer of fantasy, horror, and science fiction stories and poetry, and an artist. He achieved early recognition in California for traditional verse in the vein of Swinburne. As a poet, Smith is grouped with the West Coast Romantics alongside Joaquin Miller, Sterling, and Nora May French and remembered as "The Last of the Great Romantics" and "The Bard of Auburn". Smith's work was praised by his contemporaries. H. P. Lovecraft stated that "in sheer daemonic strangeness and fertility of conception, Clark Ashton Smith is perhaps unexcelled", and Ray Bradbury said that Smith "filled my mind with incredible worlds, impossibly beautiful cities, and still more fantastic creatures". Other writers influenced by Smith include Leigh Brackett, Harlan Ellison, Stephen King, Fritz Leiber, George R. R. Martin, and Donald Sidney-Fryer. Lovecraft, Derleth published the first of several major collections of Smith's fiction, Out of Space and Time (1942). He became Sterling's protégé and Sterling helped him to publish his first volume of poems, The Star-Treader and Other Poems, at the age of 19. In 1942, three years after August Derleth founded Arkham House for the purpose of preserving the work of H.P.
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