Clark Ashton Smith (1893 - 1961) was a self-taught American sculptor, author, and poet whose pulp fantasy and horror stories frequently appeared in Weird Tales. The strange, cosmic, and morbid themes in his stories caught the attention of science fiction innovators, Philip K. Dick and Ray Bradbury. Smith became a member of the Lovecraft circle from 1922 to 1937, when Dick died. They both had bouts of sickness as children and accompanying nightmares, which inspired both to write.
Smith had this to say about his work: "My own conscious ideal has been to delude the reader into accepting an impossibility, or series of impossibilities, by means of a sort of verbal black magic, in the achievement of which I make use of prose-rhythm, metaphor, simile, tone-color, counter-point, and other stylistic resources, like a sort of incantation." [source: eldritchdark.com.]
