Editing Clark Ashton Smith (section)

===Prolific fiction-writing period===
At the beginning of the [[Great Depression|Depression]] in 1929, with his aged parents' health weakening, Smith resumed fiction writing and turned out more than a hundred short stories between 1929 and 1934, nearly all of which can be classed as weird horror or science fiction. Like Lovecraft, he drew upon the nightmares that had plagued him during youthful spells of sickness. [[Brian Stableford]] has written that the stories written during this brief phase of hectic productivity "constitute one of the most remarkable oeuvres in imaginative literature".<ref>Brian Stableford, "Clark Ashton Smith" in David Pringle (ed), ''St James Guide to Fantasy Writers'', Detroit MI: St James Press, 1996, pp.529–30</ref>

He published at his own expense a volume containing six of his best stories, ''The Double Shadow and Other Fantasies'', in an edition of 1000 copies printed by the ''Auburn Journal''. The theme of much of his work is egotism and its supernatural punishment; his weird fiction is generally macabre in subject matter, gloatingly preoccupied with images of death, decay and abnormality.

Most of Smith's weird fiction falls into four series set variously in [[Hyperborean cycle|Hyperborea]], [[Poseidonis]], [[Averoigne]] and [[Zothique]]. Hyperborea, which is a lost continent of the Miocene period, and Poseidonis, which is a remnant of Atlantis, are much the same, with a magical culture characterized by bizarreness, cruelty, death and postmortem horrors. Averoigne is Smith's version of pre-modern France, comparable to [[James Branch Cabell]]'s Poictesme. Zothique exists millions of years in the future. It is "the last continent of earth, when the sun is dim and tarnished". These tales have been compared to the ''[[Dying Earth]]'' sequence of [[Jack Vance]].

In 1933 Smith began corresponding with [[Robert E. Howard]], the Texan creator of [[Conan the Barbarian]]. From 1933 to 1936, Smith, Howard and Lovecraft were the leaders of the [[Weird Tales]] school of fiction and corresponded frequently, although they never met. The writer of oriental fantasies [[E. Hoffmann Price]] is the only man known to have met all three in the flesh.

Critic Steve Behrends has suggested that the frequent theme of 'loss' in Smith's fiction (many of his characters attempt to recapture a long-vanished youth, early love, or picturesque past) may reflect Smith's own feeling that his career had suffered a "fall from grace":
{{blockquote|Smith's late teens and early twenties had certainly been a heady period: he'd been taken under the wing of a personal idol, the poet George Sterling, and his first book of poetry had brought him comparisons to Keats and Shelley. This notoriety must surely have raised his standing in his small hometown. And yet the depression found Smith without a job or viable occupation, unable to eke out a living as a poet, with girlfriends berating him for his lack of ambition. And while his turn to writing fiction did put bread on the table, he found it a very distasteful business at times—he had once said to Sterling that writing prose was "a hateful task, for a poet, and [one which] wouldn't be necessary in any true civilisation." In short, it may be that Smith experienced that variety of "let-down" or loss peculiar to the child prodigies.<ref>Steve Behrends. "The Song of the Necromancer: 'Loss' in Clark Ashton Smith's Fiction". ''Studies in Weird Fiction'' 1, No 1 (Summer 1986), 3–12.</ref>}}