Robert W. Chambers

Robert W. Chambers (1865–1933) was an American writer and illustrator, born in Brooklyn. He studied painting in Paris at the Académie Julian and the École des Beaux-Arts and exhibited at the Salon before turning to fiction. His second book, The King in Yellow (1895), a collection of linked stories about a play that drives its readers mad, is the work for which he is remembered, admired by H. P. Lovecraft and a source for later weird fiction. Chambers himself moved on to romantic and historical novels that sold enormously in the early twentieth century and are now largely forgotten.