The King in Yellow de Robert W. Chambers

The King in Yellow

Robert W. Chambers

A milestone of American supernatural fiction, The King in Yellow created a sensation upon its 1895 publication. Since then, it has markedly influenced writers in the genre, most famously, H. P. Lovecraft. Author Robert W. Chambers has been hailed as a writer of remarkable imaginative powers and the historic link between Edgar Allan Poe and Stephen King. This edition features the original 10 gripping stories. The book is named after a fictional play with the same title which recurs as a motif through some of the stories. The first half of the book features highly esteemed weird stories, and the book is described by S.T. Joshi as a classic in the field of the supernatural. There are ten stories, the first four of which, "The Repairer of Reputations," "The Mask," "In the Court of the Dragon" and "The Yellow Sign," mention The King in Yellow, a forbidden play which induces despair or madness in those who read it.

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Robert William Chambers (1865 - 1933) was an American artist and fiction writer, best known for his book of short stories entitled The King in Yellow, published in 1895. 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 Art Nouveau short stories published in 1895. This included several famous weird short stories which are connected by the theme of a fictitious drama of the same title, which drives those who read it insane. E. F. Bleiler described The King in Yellow as one of the most important works of American supernatural fiction. It was also strongly admired by H. P. Lovecraft and his circle. 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. Some of Chambers's work contains elements of science fiction, such as In Search of the Unknown and Police!!!, about a zoologist who encounters monsters. 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.