Born, raised, and intellectually and culturally formed in New Bedford, Massachusetts, the whaling capital of the world in the 1800"s, Donald Sidney-Fryer came to the Golden State when he turned twenty-one. During 1956 through 1960 and the summer of 1964, he studied Theatre Arts, French, and Spanish at U.C.L.A., and received his B.A. in French language and literature in September of 1964. His discovery of the prose fictions and poetry of Clark Ashton Smith led to Sidney-Fryer"s investigation of that group of poets and fictioneers to which Smith belonged, now known (thanks to Sidney-Fryer) as the California Romantics. This fantastic pride of scriveners includes Ambrose Bierce, George Sterling, Nora May French, and others. In the five decades since 1961, the year of Smith"s death, Sidney-Fryer has written at length on these writers, their lives, and their over-all achievements, as well as editing significant collections of their writings, when otherwise they remained almost totally...