Clark Ashton Smith
Clark Ashton Smith is an author.
Clark Ashton Smith was an American writer of fantasy, horror and science fiction, and an artist besides. He made his name in California as a poet in the Swinburne mould, admired enough to be grouped with the West Coast Romantics beside Joaquin Miller, George Sterling and Nora May French, and nicknamed the Bard of Auburn. The pulps came later, and the prose kept the poet's habits: an enormous vocabulary, exhausted civilisations, an amused cruelty toward his own characters. H. P. Lovecraft, a correspondent, said that in sheer daemonic strangeness and fertility of conception Smith was perhaps unexcelled, and Ray Bradbury credited him with filling his mind as a young reader.
Books (3)
Where to start with Clark Ashton Smith
Zothique is the one to read first: the far-future cycle set on the last continent, where sorcery and spent empires give his taste for ornate doom the most room to work. The Spawn of Cthulhu places him in the H.P. Lovecraft circle he wrote alongside, and Swords Against Darkness among the sword and sorcery writers who inherited his tone. Read him for sentences rather than plots; the plots are usually a slow walk toward a bad idea.
Clark Ashton Smith on CrossBinge
- Companion guide: Cosmic Horror