The Collected Fantasies of Clark Ashton Smith: A Vintage From Atlantis

by Clark Ashton Smith

Overview

Published in chronological order, with extensive story and bibliographic notes, this series not only provides access to stories that have been out of print for years, but gives them a historical and social context. Series editors Scott Conners and Ronald S. Hilger excavated the still-existing manuscripts, letters and various published versions of the stories, creating a definitive “preferred text” for Smith's entire body of work. This third volume of the series brings together 21 of his fantasy stories.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781597803649
Publisher:	Night Shade Books
Publication date:	11/01/2007
Series:	Collected Fantasies of Clark Ashton Smith , #3
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	300
Sales rank:	336,880
File size:	947 KB

About the Author

Clark Ashton Smith was born on January 13, 1893, in Long Valley, California, but lived most of his life in Auburn. Ill health as a child prevented him from attending all but five years of school, but he set upon an extensive campaign of self-education. He began to write at an early age, and sold several short stories to magazines such as Overland Monthly and Black Cat at the age of seventeen. Smith’s first book, The Star-Treader and Other Poems, was a sensation when published in 1912. He was hailed by the San Francisco press as a new Keats and as the boy-poet of the Sierras. Ambrose Bierce read some of Smith’s poems in manuscript and praised them highly. The necessity to care for his aging parents led Smith to take up the writing of imaginative short stories for pulp magazines such as Wonder Stories and Weird Tales in the late 1920s. During the space of five years he turned out approximately one hundred polished and imaginative tales of “inconceivable fear and unimaginable love.” These were later collected together, and have been translated into several languages. The deaths of his parents, combined with a growing disgust at the low standards of pulp editors and readers, led to his resumption of poetry writing. Smith married late in life, to Carol Dorman, and moved to Pacific Grove in 1954. He died in 1961, having seen his fourth collection of short stories, The Abominations of Yondo, achieve print.