"The King In Yellow" by Robert W. Chambers - 1965 Ace Science Fiction/Horror Paperback M-132• 1st Paperback Printing & 2nd Edition following the Neely 1st back in 1895.Chambers was an important author in his day & this unique & eccentric one time best selling collection of strangely blended Science Fiction & Horror is eminently readable & a must have in any basic library of fantastic literature. It is an anthology wherein several of the stories are threaded together by a dreaded document. Lovecraft was influenced by this collection. ($19.99)
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This is "The King In Yellow" by Robert W. Chambers, Ace Books. The cover price on the book is $.45. Robert William Chambers (May 26, 1865 – December 16, 1933) was an American artist and writer. 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 ) . His 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) 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' returned to the weird genre in his later short story collections The Maker of Moons and The Tree of Heaven, but neither earned him such success as "The King in Yellow" .
Chambers later turned to writing 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 .
Chambers, for several years made Broadalbin his summer home. Some of his novels touch upon colonial life in Broadalbin and Johnstown.
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) who 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 at his home in the village of Broadalbin, 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).
The King in Yellow is a collection of short stories written by Robert W. Chambers and published in 1895. The stories could be categorized as early horror fiction or Victorian Gothic fiction, but the work also touches on mythology, fantasy, mystery, science fiction and romance. The first four stories in the collection involve a fictional two-act play of the same title ($1.99)
Chambers' returned to the weird genre in his later short story collections The Maker of Moons and The Tree of Heaven, but neither earned him such success as "The King in Yellow" .
Chambers later turned to writing 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 .
Chambers, for several years made Broadalbin his summer home. Some of his novels touch upon colonial life in Broadalbin and Johnstown.
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) who 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 at his home in the village of Broadalbin, 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).
The King in Yellow is a collection of short stories written by Robert W. Chambers and published in 1895. The stories could be categorized as early horror fiction or Victorian Gothic fiction, but the work also touches on mythology, fantasy, mystery, science fiction and romance. The first four stories in the collection involve a fictional two-act play of the same title ($1.99)
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