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Jan 13, 1893 — Aug 14, 1961· 68 yrs

UNITED STATES AUTHOR · FANTASY FICTION · SHORT

Clark Ashton Smith

Also known as: Clark Ashton Smith, Timeus Gaylord

32
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Clark Ashton Smith (January 13, 1893 – August 14, 1961) was an American writer and artist. He achieved early local recognition, largely through the enthusiasm of George Sterling, 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". Smith was one of "the big three of Weird Tales, with Robert E. Howard and H. P. Lovecraft", but some readers objected to his morbidness and violation of pulp traditions. The fantasy critic L. Sprague de Camp said of him that "nobody since Poe has so loved a well-rotted corpse." Smith was a member of the Lovecraft circle and his literary friendship with Lovecraft lasted from 1922 until Lovecraft's death in 1937. 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." Source: [Clark Ashton Smith]( on Wikipedia.

Long Valley, United States
Wikipedia

The last time I saw him, though I did not know it would be the last, I was sitting on the terrace with a friend and he came through the gate sweating, his face and chest pink, his hair damp, and stopped politely to talk to us.

— from The end of the story

Most acclaimed

#1

The Oxford Book of Gothic Tales

2001

4.0 (1)

Part 1 Beginnings: "Sir Bertrand - A Fragment" (1773), Anna Laetitia Aiken "The Poisoner of Montremos" (1791), Richard Cumberland "The Friar's Tale" (1792), Anonymous "Raymond - A Fragment (1799), "Juvenis" "The Parricide Punished" (1799), Anonymous "The Ruins of the Abbey of Fitz-Martin" (1801), Anonymous "The Vindictive Monk, or The Fatal Ring" (1802), Isaac Crookenden. Part 2 The 19th century: "The Astrologer's Prediction or the Maniac's Fate" (1826), Anonymous "Andreas Vesalius the Anatomist" (1833), Petrus Borel "Lady Eltringham or The Castle of Ratcliffe Cross" (1836), J. Wadham "[The Fall of the House of Usher]( (1839), Edgar Allan Poe "A Chapter in the History of the Tyrone Family" (1839), Sheridan Le Fanu "[Rappacini's Daughter]( (1844), Nathaniel Hawthorne "Selina Sedilia" (1865), Bret Harte "Jean-Ah Poquelin" (1875), George Washington Cable "Olalla" (1885), Robert Louis Stevenson "Barbara of the House of Grebe" (1891), Thomas Hardy "Bloody Blanche" (1892), Marcel Schwob "The Yellow Wall-Paper" (1892), Charlotte Perkins Stetson "[The Adventure of the Speckled Band]( (1892), Arthur Conan Doyle "Hurst of Hurstcote" (1893), E. Nesbit. Part 3 The 20th century: "A Vine on the House" (1905), Ambrose Bierce "Jordan's End" (1923), Ellen Glasgow "The Outsider" (1926), H.P. Lovecraft "[A Rose for Emily]( (1930), William Faulkner "A Rendezvous in Averoigne" (1931), Clark Ashton Smith "The Monkey" (1934), Isak Dinesen "Miss De Mannering of Asham" (1935), F.M. Mayor "The Vampire of Kaldenstein" (1938), Frederick Cowles "Clytie" (1941), Eudora Welty "Sardonicus" (1961), Ray Russell "The Bloody Countess" (1968), Alejandra Pizarnik "The Gospel According to Mark" (1970), Jorge Luis Borges "The Lady of the House of Love" (1979), Angela Carter "Secret Observations of the Goat-Girl" (1988), Joyce Carol Oates "Blood Disease" (1988), Patrick McGrath "If You Touched My Heart" (1991), Isabel Allende.

#2

A Vintage from Atlantis: The Collected Fantasies, Vol. 3 (Collected Fantasies of Clark Ashton Smit)

0.0 (0)
#3

Dawnward Spire, Lonely Hill : The Letters of H. P. Lovecraft and Clark Ashton Smith

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