The Winter 2007 issue of "The University Bookman," which was founded by Russell Kirk, features an essay by Thomas F. Bertonneau called "Red Mist: How Small Presses Rescue Classic Genre Writers from Oblivion." It may be read in its entirety at
[www.kirkcenter.org]. The relevant portions follow:

Selected Letters of Clark Ashton Smith (2003), a recent addition to the Arkham House catalogue edited by David E. Schultz and Scott Connors, complements the five volumes of Lovecraft’s epistolary writing. Poet, painter, sculptor, fiction-writer, polymath-autodidact, and lifelong gold-country Californian, Smith (1893 – 1961) like Lovecraft reveals himself in his missives as a man of real intellect, a fine stylist, a connoisseur of poetry and the plastic arts, and a firm defender of his carefully formulated convictions. Would that a representative contemporary humanities professor possessed but a fraction of Smith’s grace and judgment! Smith’s erudition and gentlemanliness tell us that the pulp writers, despite the stereotypes that would dismiss them, were often (the best of them at least) genuine literary practitioners: thoughtful, civilized men with a curatorial attitude toward the common artistic inheritance, who took pleasure, amidst a characteristic poverty, in well-worn books culled from the second-hand shops and a wide and regular correspondence with their far-flung colleagues. Smith’s family had settled, to farm, in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada Mountains in the community of Long Valley, California; Smith stuck to his native ground, seeing no reason why art could not thrive in a rural locale, and in his teens was already a published poet under the tutelage of the California bard George Sterling.

The letters, covering the five decades from 1911 to 1961, deliver fascinating, splendidly informed discussions of French Symbolist poetry, of British aestheticism, of trends in modern literature and painting, as well as a running commentary on what it meant to earn one’s keep as a penny-a-word writer for perishable monthlies. In a 1949 letter addressed to Derleth concerning the generics of science fiction, Smith complains that a critical symposium on the topic has failed to be sufficiently historical: “I was quite surprised that no one mentioned Lucian, Apuleius and Rabelais among the forefathers of the genre, since all three are of prime importance. Lucian was a satirist and a skeptic who, in the form of imaginative fiction, endeavored to ‘debunk’ the religious superstitions and contending philosophies of his time; being, one might say, somewhat analogous to Aldous Huxley, who in his turn has satirized modern science.” In another 1949 letter, addressed this time to Samuel J. Sackett (then a student, later an English professor, at UCLA), Smith lists the formative influences on his literary work: “Poe should head the list. Baudelaire and George Sterling in regard to poetry, and Lovecraft and Dunsany in regard to prose, should be added… Lafcadio Hearn, Gautier and Flaubert (the latter at least in The Temptation of St. Anthony) have all helped to shape my prose style.” To L. Sprague de Camp in 1953, summarizing his formal education, Smith writes that “it has been mainly self-conducted, highly irregular, and largely a matter of my following my own vagrant and varying inclinations… My real education began with the reading of Robinson Crusoe (unabridged), Gulliver’s Travels, the fairy tales of Andersen and the Countess d’Aulnoy, The Arabian Nights and (at the age of 13) Poe’s Poems.” A few days before his death, Smith dispatches an Alexandrine sonnet to his friend Donald Sidney-Fryer. That—Lucian of Samosata and Flaubert’s Temptation of St. Anthony—is the fertile soil of Smith’s pulp fiction.