Robert W. Chambers

Robert William Chambers was an American writer and illustrator, best known for The King in Yellow, a collection of horror and fantasy stories published in 1895. He worked between art and literature during the transition from the nineteenth to the twentieth century, and his name remains tied to the weird fiction of that period.

Born in Brooklyn in 1865, he was the son of a lawyer who specialised in corporate law. He studied at the Brooklyn Polytechnic Institute and, around 1886, moved to Paris to train in fine arts; his work was shown at the Salon in 1889. Back in New York he sold illustrations to magazines such as Life, Truth and Vogue, and for a time he was among the most sought-after illustrators of the day. His turn to writing seems to have been an unplanned shift. In 1894 he published In the Quarter, a set of sketches of bohemian Paris life, and the following year came The King in Yellow, which mixed Parisian portraits with stories of fantasy and terror and enjoyed great success.

His later output was varied. He continued the weird vein in The Maker of Moons and The Mystery of Choice, moved toward science fiction with In Search of the Unknown (1904), and wrote historical novels, detective stories and society romances set among New York's upper classes. Some of his books became bestsellers. He spent freely on collections of butterflies, furniture and art, and on planting trees on the family estate. Criticism mattered little to him, and he often played down his own literary reputation.

His lasting reputation rests mainly on his early supernatural stories. H. P. Lovecraft admired them, though he regretted that Chambers later turned to more commercial work, which he described as the decline of a fallen titan. Chambers died in December 1933, three days after intestinal surgery. He is remembered today for that 1895 book, which inspired many writers who followed him.