
author
1865–1933
Best known today for the eerie classic The King in Yellow, this American writer also trained as an artist and went on to publish a long stream of popular novels and stories. His work moves from strange, unsettling fantasy to romance, adventure, and historical fiction.

by Robert W. (Robert William) Chambers

by Robert W. (Robert William) Chambers

by Robert W. (Robert William) Chambers

by Robert W. (Robert William) Chambers

by Robert W. (Robert William) Chambers

by Robert W. (Robert William) Chambers

by Robert W. (Robert William) Chambers

by Robert W. (Robert William) Chambers

by Robert W. (Robert William) Chambers

by Robert W. (Robert William) Chambers

by Robert W. (Robert William) Chambers

by Robert W. (Robert William) Chambers

by Robert W. (Robert William) Chambers

by Robert W. (Robert William) Chambers

by Robert W. (Robert William) Chambers

by Robert W. (Robert William) Chambers

by Robert W. (Robert William) Chambers

by Robert W. (Robert William) Chambers

by Robert W. (Robert William) Chambers

by Robert W. (Robert William) Chambers

by Robert W. (Robert William) Chambers

by Robert W. (Robert William) Chambers

by Robert W. (Robert William) Chambers

by Robert W. (Robert William) Chambers

by Robert W. (Robert William) Chambers

by Robert W. (Robert William) Chambers

by Robert W. (Robert William) Chambers

by Robert W. (Robert William) Chambers

by Robert W. (Robert William) Chambers

by Robert W. (Robert William) Chambers

by Robert W. (Robert William) Chambers

by Robert W. (Robert William) Chambers

by Robert W. (Robert William) Chambers

by Robert W. (Robert William) Chambers

by Robert W. (Robert William) Chambers

by Robert W. (Robert William) Chambers

by Robert W. (Robert William) Chambers

by Robert W. (Robert William) Chambers

by Robert W. (Robert William) Chambers

by Robert W. (Robert William) Chambers

by Robert W. (Robert William) Chambers

by Robert W. (Robert William) Chambers

by Robert W. (Robert William) Chambers

by Robert W. (Robert William) Chambers

by Robert W. (Robert William) Chambers

by Robert W. (Robert William) Chambers

by Robert W. (Robert William) Chambers
Born in Brooklyn, New York, on May 26, 1865, Robert W. Chambers studied at the Art Students League in New York and later in Paris at the Académie Julian and the École des Beaux-Arts. He began his career as an illustrator and painter before turning seriously to fiction.
His early books brought together his visual imagination and his taste for the uncanny. The King in Yellow (1895) became his most lasting work, especially for its strange, linked tales of dread and decadence, and it later influenced generations of horror and weird-fiction writers. He also wrote historical fiction, adventure stories, and society novels, becoming a very prolific and widely read author in his own time.
Chambers died in New York on December 16, 1933. Although much of his enormous output is less remembered now, his name remains firmly alive because of the haunting atmosphere and imaginative power of his best fantastic stories.