Hello fellow Clark Ashton Smith fans.....
I have been a lurker here on this website for a long time....I have all the CAS works of fiction as well as his wonderful poetry but enjoy the online works....so easy to sit in front of my computer and read a piece....and it is so easy to send a friend who may not have heard of CAS a link in email to a particular Smith story or poem...
Why is Lovecraft so much more widely known than CAS....many people I meet have at least heard of Lovecraft but cock their heads and give me a blank stare when I mentions CAS. The two authors, though not without similarities, are vastly different writers, however that is good as they each bring something different to our plates....
Does anyone have any ideas on this topic?

--Loton--

Talent has nothing to do with fame - look at Holywood.

While Boyd is quite right that talent and fame do not always go together, that doesn't really do much for the HPL vs. CAS question. I suppose we agree that they both bad talent. A very special development process took place with Lovecraft as his posthumous fame caught on and found sometimes questionable support in different areas of popular culture. Lovecraft can be found represented in radio drama, motion pictures, television, even comics, even if most of these treatments are rather bad. Smith had seldom jumped from one medium to another, either successfully or otherwise. We might find internal reasons in Smith's work to suggest why so few adaptations have been attempted. But in many ways, the Lovecraft cult has begun to bring similar popularity to Smith. Jason Thompson, whose wonderful comic mini-series based on The Dream Quest of Unknown Kadath is in the process of being turned into an animated feature film, has also begun work on another comic series based on Smith's Hyperborea tales. It has been suggested that Lovecraft's style of writing is difficult or impossible to translate into cinema, and I don't plan to disagree. But they keep trying. With Smith, there has been almost no tradition of adapting his works. CASmith on TV seems limited to Night Gallery's Return of the Sorcerer. To finish up, I suspect that the development of Lovecraft's popularity was uniquely his and simply is not comparable to the more limited awareness of CASmith. It may irritate fans of Smith and even Robert E. Howard, but I think in both cases the often repeated phrase, friend of H.P. Lovecraft, may be there to stay.

Gavin,
Thank you for your thoughtful and inciteful reply to my question of why Lovecraft has become more well known to the general public than CAS. I am not sure if Boyd was trying to say Lovecraft's talent is not on the level with CAS's but that was what I gleened from the comment. Of course it's very brevity makes it hard to assume anything for sure, however, if I am correct then I have to disagree. I Love both writers on perhaps an equal par. I am sure they both had immience talent as most scholars of fantastic writing would agree. I do not personally place Robert E. Howard (whom you also mention, Gavin) on quite the plane that I do Lovecraft and Smith.
I think for the most part I agree with Gavin's assessment. Further, perhaps having peaple like August Derleth and Donald Wandrei striving through decades of time to keep Lovecraft's works alive, read, and recognized ...to the public through their joint venture of Arkham House may have played a large role in getting Lovecraft into the public eye and thus into the bad media adeptations of his work which further put his name on John Q Public's tongue. I am am aware that Arkham House also published the works of CAS, but Lovecraft's work was kept in print while CAS's work was not always kept in print....so perhaps the ferver with which they pushed Lovecraft's work played a role in Lovecraft being generally more well known than Smith. Thank you again Gavin for the reply to my question....are there any other opinions?
--Loton--

While you are all probably aware of it, there were two Conan comics
issued a few years ago based on CAS stories - I have these in my
archives - I can dig out the issue numbers and the stories used
if interested.
Dr. F

Thanks, Dr. Farmer. I can't foresee looking them up by number, but which stories were used in those Conan comics, I wonder? Were they adapted to the Conan story, or did they do separate and independant stories without putting Conan into them?