Editing Clark Ashton Smith (section)

===Early life and education===
Smith was born January 13, 1893, in Long Valley, [[Placer County, California]], into a family of English and New England heritage. He spent most of his life in the small town of [[Auburn, California]], living in a cabin built by his parents, Fanny and Timeus Smith. Smith professed to hate the town's provincialism but rarely left it until he married late in life.

His formal education was limited: he suffered from psychological disorders including intense [[agoraphobia]], and although he was accepted to high school after attending eight years of grammar school, his parents decided it was better for him to be taught at home. An insatiable reader with an extraordinary [[eidetic memory]], Smith appeared to retain most or all of whatever he read. After leaving formal education, he embarked upon a self-directed course of literature, including ''[[Robinson Crusoe]]'', ''[[Gulliver's Travels]]'', the fairy tales of [[Hans Christian Andersen]] and [[Madame d'Aulnoy]], the ''[[Arabian Nights]]'' and the poems of [[Edgar Allan Poe]]. He read an unabridged dictionary word for word, studying not only the definitions of the words but also their [[etymology]].<ref>de Camp 1976, p. 197-98</ref>

The other main course in Smith's self-education was to read the complete [[Encyclopædia Britannica Eleventh Edition|11th edition]] of the ''[[Encyclopædia Britannica]]'' at least twice.<ref>Behrends 1990, p. 5</ref> Smith later taught himself French and Spanish to translate verse out of those languages, including works by [[Gérard de Nerval]], [[Paul Verlaine]], [[Amado Nervo]], [[Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer]] and all but 6 of [[Charles Baudelaire]]'s 157 poems in ''[[Les Fleurs du mal|The Flowers of Evil]]''.