Documentary film Clark Ashton Smith: The Emperor of Dreams, rediscovers one of 20th-century literature’s true originals

By Zach Hagadone
Reader Staff

Of the many hazards of being an artistic trailblazer is that your creations turn into tropes while your hand in inventing them gets forgotten. 

Courtesy image.

That’s the fate suffered by Clark Ashton Smith, who has been credited as one of the greatest unsung romantic poets of the early 20th century; a writer instrumental in developing the genres we today refer to as “weird fiction” and “fantasy”; and an outsider artist working in sculpture, ink and paint. 

However, odds are almost no one beyond a small cadre of aficionados knows of Smith’s work, much less appreciates it for its stunning originality and quality. It’s hard to believe just how complete Smith’s obscurity has been over the 100-or-so years since he first put pen to paper — especially considering that he moved in the same circles as Ambrose Bierce and Jack London, and a Providence, R.I.-based writer by the name of H.P. Lovecraft sent him a piece of fan mail that spurred a correspondence that lasted until Lovecraft’s death. 

Other members of that group of letter-writers included Robert E. Howard (creator of Conan the Barbarian), Smith was published by August Derleth and, among the writers who have credited Smith as an inspiration, include Ray Bradbury, Stephen King and Harlan Ellison. 

The latter writer features prominently in the 2018 documentary Clark Ashton Smith: The Emperor of Dreams, which reveals its subject as one of the true, great original minds of 20th century art.

Smith is widely considered to be a more technically gifted writer than Lovecraft, and his poems and short stories tread into landscapes and whole planets that the more famous of the two could only hint at. In Smith’s worlds, evil wizards conjure dire apparitions in lonely towers; fur-clad barbarians stalk through fantastical forests full of sentient, carnivorous plants; hideous gods and demons dwell in caves, luring the unwary to their doom; necromancers raise whole cities of corpses to do their foul bidding; and continents drift into a future so unfathomably distant that even the name of “Earth” is forgotten.

However, as The Emperor of Dreams makes clear, Smith’s creative genius was as boundless as his physical life was proscribed. Born in Long Valley, Calif., Smith grew up in Auburn, Calif., which he didn’t leave until his marriage at the age of 61 and relocation to Pacific Grove, Calif., where he died in 1961 at the age of 68.

He never finished school but followed the path of the autodidact, devouring the bulk of the books in his local library and teaching himself French and Spanish along the way. 

Smith started writing in earnest in his teens, with his first major recognition as “the Keats of the Pacific” coming at the age of 19, but his literary star waned even in his own lifetime, despite continuing to produce writing into the mid-1930s and sculpture, paintings and sketches until nearly the end of his life. That’s unfortunate on a number of fronts — primarily the forgotten fact that one of the pioneering practitioners of fantasy writing was a small-town Californian whose works of magic and high adventure were contemporaneous with J.R.R. Tolkien (only one year older, almost to the day, than Smith), but envisioned entirely independently.

And that’s the greatest service of The Emperor of Dreams: Putting Smith’s name back on the roster of influential writers in the English language and, hopefully, creating a few new devotees to the art of “Klarkash-Ton,” as Lovecraft playfully referred to him. 

Rent or purchase Clark Ashton Smith: The Emperor of Dreams on Amazon prime.