The Archive · Author dossier

Robert W. Chambers

Lifespan: 1865 – 1933
Nationality: American
Active: 1895 – 1919
Works held: 6

Robert W. Chambers (1865–1933) was a hugely successful popular novelist, but is remembered now for a slim early book: The King in Yellow (1895), a set of linked weird tales centred on a forbidden play that drives its readers mad. Its dreamlike dread influenced Lovecraft and the whole cosmic-horror lineage, and it has enjoyed a striking modern revival. A key node in the genre’s weird-fiction ancestry.

The works

1919

The Slayer of Souls
1915

Police!!!
1911

The Gay Rebellion
1904

In Search of the Unknown
1895

The King in Yellow T The King in Yellow

Wrote across

1890s 1900s 1910s

Recurring themes

Horror Fantasy First Contact Utopia Social SF

Kindred authors shared themes

H. G. Wells Bryce Walton Carl Jacobi Edmond Hamilton Evelyn E. Smith Fritz Leiber James McKimmey Margaret St. Clair

Contemporaries writing in the same era

H. G. Wells L. Frank Baum Edgar Rice Burroughs Luis Senarens E. Nesbit Lord Dunsany Algernon Blackwood John Kendrick Bangs Jack London Victor Appleton

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