It is some times hard to remember his time before the sensitivity to race brought forth in the 1960�s. The view Chambers put forth is in keeping with most of WASP America then current, who saw the solution to their nation�s troubles in terms of �the exclusion of foreign-born Jews as a measure of national self-preservation, the settlement of the new independent negro state of Suanee, the checking of immigration, the new laws concerning naturalization, and the gradual centralization of power in the executive...� * Note also Chambers views on government assisted suicide and how much they match the views of a certain doctor who is much in today�s headlines. DOWN

Robert W. Chambers was not a prophet. His later career has much more to do with profit and ego, his subject matter and style changing at the slightest breeze of public whim. The question is not why he stopped writing like he did in The King in Yellow the question is why he ever wrote that way in the first place?

Chambers was a different man in Paris then the upper class boy that went to the Art Student League with Charles Dana Gibson. His later writings seem to be from a different hand and soul. Read The Fighting Chance if you can, I couldn�t. Then compare it to The King in Yellow.What was happening to Chambers in Paris? Why is this one book so much greater then that that came after?

My view is that young Robert was driven out of his mind by the destruction of his first love relationship, possible at the hands of his father who may have felt that his son�s choice in lady friends was beneath their class. This is just my view.DOWN

What facts do I have to support this view? Just the complete body of Robert W. Chambers� work. The broken heart is on the sleeve that wrote The Mask and The Yellow Sign, two of the greatest from The King in Yellow, it is also there in The Demoiselle D�Ys and The Street of Four Winds. At last he whispered: "Sylvia, it is I."** Sylvia is mentioned more than once within the pages of the King, who is she? Is she his lost love?

The King in Yellow is a love story gone very, very wrong, written by a young man who has had his first true love ripped from his arms. It is written in grief. The rest of Chambers� career deals with one theme and one theme only. That theme is the obstacles put in the path of true love by the parents, almost always the father or uncle, of the upper class. No matter what the subject, historical, romance, adventure, or even horror, this theme is almost always in the mix, waiting in the wings.DOWN

The fact that The King in Yellow was written by a mad man comes as no surprise, that the author was so normal later in life is the really strange thing. I see him in his later life, his best work way behind him, wistfully bitter and overly self inflated by his popular magazine serial sales and oriental antiques, propping up a failing ego, knowing in his heart and head that he chose family and his class instead of love or even greatness. But that is just my view. Maybe he was happy with his life? Maybe there was never a Sylvia? Maybe his family didn�t step in and destroy his first love? Maybe I�m reading into his works too much just trying to form some logical pattern because I can�t understand how The Fighting Chance and The King in Yellow were written by the same man?

NOTE: All my guesses are just that, guesses. I have found no biography and precious little else of Robert W. Chambers. But I have forced myself to read far too much of his later romance fiction then is health for a proper horror fan. A lot of my wilder guesses come straight from the hunted eyes in the grainy photo from 20th Century Writers, this in not the face of a happy man. DOWN

Just in passing, his historical novels are top rate, well researched, and only slightly tainted by his ever present love obstacle theme. The Little Red Foot and Ailsa Paige are two of his best.

*"The Repairer of Reputations" from The King in Yellow
** "The Street of Four Winds" from The King in Yellow

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