The Miscellaneous Writings of Clark Ashton Smith Read Online Free

Clark Ashton Smith , ed. David E. Schultz and Scott Connors (Sauk City, WI: Arkham House, 2003): 11 (hence SL ).
    6. The Shadow of the Unattained: The Letters of George Sterling and Clark Ashton Smith , ed. David E. Schultz and S. T. Joshi (New York: Hippocampus Press, 2005): 86.
    7. The Black Book of Clark Ashton Smith , ed. Donald Sidney-Fryer and Rah Hoffman (Sauk City, WI: Arkham House, 1979), item 65.
    8. “ Weird Tales Stays Weird.” Science Fiction Weekly (March 24, 1940): 1.
    9. Robert A. W. Lowndes, “Letters.” Weird Tales Collector no. 5 (1979): 31.
    10. Henry Kuttner, letter to Clark Ashton Smith, September 5, 1937 (TLS, private collection).
    11. See Don Herron, “Notes on Clark Ashton Smith, ” Hyperborian League mailing 12 (July 1978).
    12. See William C. Farmer, “Clark Ashton Smith: A Memoir,” in Smith’s The Sword of Zagan and Other Writing , ed. W. C. Farmer (New York: Hippocampus Press, 2004): 178.
    13. Quoted in George Haas, “Memories of Klarkash-Ton.” In The Black Book of Clark Ashton Smith. Ed. Donald Sidney-Fryer and Rah Hoffman (Sauk City, WI: Arkham House, 1979): 137.

T HE S ORCERER D EPARTS
    Donald Sidney-Fryer

I pass… but in this lone and crumbling tower,
Builded against the burrowing seas of chaos,
My volumes and my philtres shall abide:
Poisons more dear than any mithridate,
And spells far sweeter than the speech of love…
Half-shapen dooms shall slumber in my vaults
And in my volumes cryptic runes that shall
Outblast the pestilence, outgnaw the worm
When loosed by alien wizards on strange years
Under the blackened moon and paling sun.

    “The Sorcerer Departs”
    Clark Ashton Smith
    Fragment of unfinished poem ( The Acolyte , Spring 1944).

    A B IOGRAPHY OF C LARK A SHTON S MITH

      or those of us who recognize in the late Clark Ashton Smith a poet and a poet in prose as remarkable as the French genius Baudelaire, the preceding “fragment”—actually far more complete than many a longer poem—cannot but possess certain poignant autobiographical associations. The eventuality stated symbolically in the last lines is devoutly to be wished: that connoisseurs of fantasy, whether in the immediate or the far future, shall indeed come to know the canon of Smith’s works and appreciate his quite considerable achievement, and that Smith shall thus come to realize the only type of immortality any human being may reasonably expect, at least as far as such is known.
    When Clark Ashton Smith died on August 14th, 1961, his death passed almost completely unnoticed, apart from a few local newspapers in his native state of California. No Saturday Review of Literature , no Atlantic Monthly devoted an entire memorial issue to the man and his writings. To the knowledge of the present writer, not a single science fiction or fantasy magazine even mentioned the fact of his death. Smith’s connections with the main literary river of his own time were at best tenuous, if not just about non-existent; his connections with the tributary or sub-tributary of the science fiction and fantasy magazines, proved only a little less gossamer. The echoes of his earlier poetic fame in the Bohemian circles of San Francisco and Monterey had long since died away, and thus he died, little better than unknown to his own time.
    The biography of Smith’s external life is relatively uneventful, although still significant; but this relative uneventfulness places a greater importance on the life of the inner man, on the inner life of the literary creator, where such is known to us and where it is revealed in his works. However, it will still be to some purpose to review the more salient facts of biography with particular emphasis on those details which strongly relate to his creative life.
    Smith was born of Yankee and English parentage on January 13th, 1893, in Long Valley, California, about six miles south of Auburn, in the house of his maternal grandparents (the Gaylords) located along the old road leading south of