The Golden State Phantasticks

Born, raised, and intellectually and culturally formed in New Bedford,Massachusetts, the whaling capital of the world in the 1800's, DonaldSidney-Fryer came to the Golden State when he turned twenty-one.During 1956 through 1960 and the summer of 1964, he studied TheatreArts, French, and Spanish at U.C.L.A., and received his B.A. in Frenchlanguage and literature in September of 1964. His discovery of the prosefictions and poetry of Clark Ashton Smith led to Sidney-Fryer's investigationof that group of poets and fictioneers to which Smith belonged, nowknown (thanks to Sidney-Fryer) as the California Romantics.This fantastic pride of scriveners includes Ambrose Bierce, GeorgeSterling, Nora May French, and others. In the five decades since 1961, theyear of Smith's death, Sidney-Fryer has written at length on these writers,their lives, and their over-all achievements, as well as editing significantcollections of their writings, when otherwise they remained almost totallyneglected and unheralded.Apart from the two dozen books and booklets he has compiled, written,and/or edited, Sidney-Fryer has done more than pioneer in scholarshipconcerning Ashton Smith and his fellow poets. Summoned by his firstand extended reading of Edmund Spenser's epic The Faerie Queene to hisown vocation as a poet (during the winter and spring of 1961), Sidney-Fryer has in particular continued the traditions of the California Romanticsin an innovative and radical manner. He has also given innumerablerecitals not just of his own works but of those by his chosen predecessors,including Spenser along with many others.This volume gathers together for the first time the essays and reviews ofthis pioneer of phantastick literature, mostly long out of print andreprinted here for the first time.