author
Clark Ashton Smith
1893–1961
A self-taught poet, painter, and storyteller from California, he became one of the great dreamers of weird fiction, known for lush, haunting prose and richly imagined worlds. His work moves easily between poetry, fantasy, horror, and science fiction, and still feels strange in the best way.
2 Audiobooks
Ebony and Crystal: Poems in Verse and Prose
by Clark Ashton Smith
The Star-Treader, and other poems
by Clark Ashton Smith
About the author
Born in California in 1893, Clark Ashton Smith grew up largely in Auburn and educated himself outside formal schooling. He first gained attention as a poet, encouraged by the writer George Sterling, and built an early reputation for ornate, musical verse before turning more heavily toward fantastic fiction.
In the 1920s and 1930s, he became a major voice in pulp fantasy and horror, publishing stories in magazines such as Weird Tales. He is especially remembered alongside H. P. Lovecraft and Robert E. Howard as one of the central writers of early weird fiction, creating vivid story cycles set in places like Hyperborea, Zothique, and Averoigne.
Smith was also an artist and sculptor, and that visual imagination shows in his writing: his stories are filled with color, texture, ruined kingdoms, and cosmic unease. Although he was never as commercially famous as some of his peers, his style and worldbuilding have had a long afterlife, and readers still come to him for language that is both beautiful and unsettling.