At seventeen, Smith was selling stories to The Black Cat, The Overland Monthly, and other magazines. His first collection of verse was published only two years later, and was hailed as the work of a prodigy and classed with work of Chatterton, Rossetti and Bryant. He resumed the writing of short stories as a profession when he was past thirty-five, and it was then, with publication in Weird Tales of "The End of the Story," that he came into his own in prose. The success of that story inspired others, all weird, macabre, fantastic or pseudo-scientific, all equally popular with readers. Since that time he has contributed poetry and fiction to over fifty magazines, including The Yale Review, The London Mercury, Munsey's, Asia, Wings, Poetry: A Magazine of Verse, The Philippine Magazine and the Mencken Smart Set. His poetry has been included in more than a dozen anthologies, and some of his translations from Baudelaire have been used in an anthology of The Flowers of Evil published by the Limited Editions Club.