Clark Ashton Smith

1 universe Last reviewed 2026-08-27

Clark Ashton Smith was an American writer born in 1893 in Long Valley, Placer County, California, into a family of English and New England heritage, and spent most of his life in a cabin in Auburn, California, built by his parents, Fanny and Timeus Smith. His formal schooling ended after grammar school; due to severe agoraphobia he was homeschooled, but he possessed an eidetic memory, reportedly reading an unabridged dictionary and the Encyclopaedia Britannica cover to cover, and taught himself French and Spanish to translate poets such as Baudelaire and Verlaine. He published his first poetry collection at age 19 in 1912 and was compared to Keats before turning primarily to prose during the Great Depression, producing over one hundred stories between 1929 and 1934. Active in Weird Tales alongside H. P. Lovecraft, with whom he maintained a close friendship and correspondence from 1922 until Lovecraft's death in 1937, and Robert E. Howard, he wrote over 100 weird-fiction and science-fiction stories in cycles set in realms including Hyperborea, Zothique, Averoigne, and Poseidonis. He married Carol Jones Dorman in 1954 and later turned largely to sculpture and painting. He died in his sleep in August 1961 in Pacific Grove, California, and his work influenced later writers including Stephen King and George R. R. Martin.

Universe(s)

Books

• Zothique: The Final Cycle (1970) · Zothique Core Canon

Aggregate across all universes

• Total Core Canon books across all universes: 1 book
• Award recognitions across all universes: 0 (None recorded)

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