Robert W. Chambers was born in Brooklyn in 1865. After completing his basic education, he studied painting first in New York and later in Paris. Very soon, however, he turned to literature, and over the course of a prolific career he wrote more than seventy works, including novels and short story collections across a variety of genres.
He died in 1933. His work The King in Yellow is considered a masterpiece of weird fiction and is the work that secured his lasting reputation and his prominent place in the genre of fantastic literature, which he retains to this day. Chambers influenced many writers of the fantastic tradition, such as Algernon Blackwood, Clark Ashton Smith, and Robert E. Howard, but most profoundly and significantly H. P. Lovecraft.
