Background
Robert William Chambers was born on May 26, 1865, in Brooklyn, New York, United States, to William P. Chambers, a corporate and bankruptcy lawyer, and Caroline Smith Boughton.
Robert William Chambers was born on May 26, 1865, in Brooklyn, New York, United States, to William P. Chambers, a corporate and bankruptcy lawyer, and Caroline Smith Boughton.
Robert was first educated at the Brooklyn Polytechnic Institute but decided to pursue a career as an artist. He went to the Art Students' League at around the age of twenty and in 1886 travelled to Paris to study at the Ecole des beaux-arts and later at the Academic Julien until 1893.
On returning to New York in 1893, Chambers worked as an illustrator for the magazines Life, Truth, and Vogue, and published his first book, In the Quarter. With the success of his second work, The King in Yellow, Chambers abandoned art for a literary career, a decision which proved extremely lucrative.
Chambers later turned to writing romantic fiction to earn a living. According to some estimates, Chambers had 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.
Chambers returned to the weird genre in his later short story collections The Maker of Moons, The Mystery of Choice and The Tree of Heaven, but none earned him as much success as The King in Yellow.
During World War I, he wrote war adventure novels and war stories, some of which showed a strong return to his old weird style, such as "Marooned" in Barbarians (1917). After 1924 he devoted himself solely to writing historical fiction.
Chambers also for several years made Broadalbin, New York, his summer home. Some of his novels touch upon colonial life in Broadalbin and Johnstown.
Considered one of the most important authors of supernatural horror fiction since Edgar Allan Poe, Robert W. Chambers is best remembered for his bizarre, imaginative tales of the supernatural, especially those included in his 1895 collection, The King in Yellow. Later, the collection of weird short stories was noted to be one of the most important works of American supernatural fiction and inspired many modern authors, including Karl Edward Wagner, Joseph S. Pulver, Lin Carter, James Blish, Nic Pizzolato, Michael Cisco, Ann K. Schwader, Robert M. Price, Galad Elflandsson and Charles Stross.
A prolific writer of best-selling romance novels, Chambers was accused of commercialism by many critics. While his once-popular novels are largely unread today, Chambers’s supernatural stories are included among the classics of the genre.
Chambers had 14 of his works turned into movies in his lifetime. One of his books, The Common Law, was filmed three times.
Chambers was a member of the National Institute of Arts and Letters.
Physical Characteristics: Robert W. Chambers died on December 16, 1933, after having undergone intestinal surgery three days earlier.
Quotes from others about the person
H. P. Lovecraft said of Chambers 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."
On July 12, 1898, Chambers married Elsa (Elsie) Vaughn Moller. The couple had a son, Robert Edward Stuart Chambers who sometimes used the name Robert Husted Chambers.
