Clark Ashton Smith

Clark Ashton Smith was a science fiction and horror author from Long Valley California. He was born in 1893 and developed an interest in storytelling from a very young age that by the time he was eleven, he was already writing. Apart from the first five years he spent in grammar school, he was an autodidact whose intellectual prowess is clear in his sculptures, verse, painting, and prose. As a seventeen-year-old, Smith was selling magazines to the likes of “The Overland Monthly” and “The Black Cat” among many other magazines. Two years later, his published collection of poetry was classed within the ranks of Bryant, Chatterton, and Rosetti. However, he stopped writing and only went back to writing short fiction when he was thirty-five. It was at this time that he wrote “The End of the Story” through which he made his name as a notable prose writer. The success of the title was the inspiration for many other pseudo-scientific, fantastic and macabre novels that would be just as popular with readers. Since then his work has been featured in more than fifty magazines including the “Mencken Smart Set,” “The Yale Review,” “The Philippines Magazine,” “The London Mercury,” “Magazine of Verse,” “Asia,” and “Munsey’s.” His poetry has also been featured in more than a dozen anthologies.