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About Chambers:
Robert William Chambers (May 26, 1865 – December 16, 1933)
was an American artist and writer.
He was born in Brooklyn, New York, to
William P. Chambers (1827 - 1911), a famous lawyer, and Caroline Chambers (née
Boughton), a direct descendant of Roger Williams, the founder of Providence,
Rhode Island.
Robert's brother was Walter Boughton Chambers, the world-famous
architect. Robert was first educated at the Brooklyn Polytechnic
Institute, and then entered the Art Students' League at around the age of
twenty, where the artist Charles Dana Gibson was his fellow student.
Chambers
studied at the École des Beaux-Arts, and at Académie Julian, in Paris from 1886
to 1893, and his work was displayed at the Salon as early as 1889.
On his
return to New York, he succeeded in selling his illustrations to Life, Truth,
and Vogue magazines. Then, for reasons unclear, he devoted his time to writing,
producing his first novel, In the Quarter (written in 1887 in Munich).
The most famous, and perhaps most meritorious, effort is The King in Yellow, a
collection of weird fiction short stories, connected by the theme of a book (to
which the title refers to) which drives those who read it insane.
Chambers'
fictitious drama The King in Yellow features in Karl Edward Wagner's story
"The River of Night's Dreaming", while James Blish's story "More
Light" purports to include much of the actual text of the play.
Chambers
later turned to write romantic fiction to earn a living. According to some
estimates, Chambers was one of the most successful literary careers of his
period, his later novels selling well and a handful achieving best-seller
status.
Many of his works were also serialized in magazines. After 1924 he
devoted himself solely to writing Historical fiction.
On July 12, 1898, he
married Elsa Vaughn Moller (1882-1939).
They had a son, Robert Edward Stuart
Chambers (later calling himself Robert Husted Chambers) also gained some
fame as an author.
H. P. Lovecraft said of him in a letter to Clark Ashton
Smith, "Chambers is like Rupert Hughes and a few other fallen Titans -
equipped with the right brains and education but wholly out of the habit of
using them.
"Frederic Taber Cooper commented, "So much of Chambers's
work exasperates because we feel that he might so easily have made it
better.
"He died in New York on December 16th, 1933. A critical essay on
Chambers' work appears in S. T. Joshi's book The Evolution of the Weird Tale
(2004).
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