Clark Ashton Smith (January 13, 1893 – August 14, 1961) was an American writer and artist who achieved early recognition for his traditional verse, particularly through the praise of George Sterling. Known as "The Last of the Great Romantics" and "The Bard of Auburn", Smith's poetry places him with the West Coast Romantics, alongside figures such as Joaquin Miller, Sterling, and Nora May French.

His work received acclaim from contemporaries, with H. P. Lovecraft commenting on Smith's "sheer daemonic strangeness and fertility of conception", and Ray Bradbury describing how Smith "filled my mind with incredible worlds, impossibly beautiful cities, and still more fantastic creatures". As one of the "big three of Weird Tales", alongside Robert E. Howard and H. P. Lovecraft, Smith's contributions to the magazine were significant, albeit sometimes criticized for morbidity and deviation from pulp traditions.

L. Sprague de Camp spoke of Smith, saying, "nobody since Poe has so loved a well-rotted corpse". A member of the Lovecraft circle, Smith's literary friendship with Lovecraft spanned fifteen years, from 1922 until Lovecraft's death in 1937. His writing is characterized by an ornate vocabulary, cosmic perspective, and a touch of humor both sardonic and ribald.

Describing his own style, Smith said he aimed to "delude the reader into accepting an impossibility, or series of impossibilities, by means of a sort of verbal black magic", employing prose-rhythm, metaphor, simile, tone-color, and counter-point as tools akin to an incantation.