Читать книгу Out of the Dark: Tales of Terror by Robert W. Chambers - Robert W. Chambers - Страница 6

Robert William Chambers, in his day one of America’s most popular authors, was born in New York, 26 May 1865, the son of New York lawyer William P. Chambers. The family were of Scottish descent. He had an early interest in art, studying at the Art Students League in New York, and in 1886 he went to Paris where he studied at the Academie Julien for seven years. He was accompanied by Charles Dana Gibson, destined to become one of America’s most celebrated portrait painters, who also illustrated some of Chambers’s books in later life.

When Chambers and Gibson returned to America in 1893, it was Gibson who got the lucky break into an art career. Chambers turned to writing instead. His first book, In the Quarter (1894), was based on his experiences in France. It sold fairly well, enough to encourage him to try his hand at a second book based on his French sojourn. The King in Yellow (1895) turned out to be an instant success and set Chambers on a writing career that lasted forty years. It was also one of the most successful books of the macabre, a genre to which Chambers would return only occasionally during his life.

Out of the Dark contains the best of Chambers’s work in this field, taken from books as far apart in publication as 1895 and 1920. By the time of his death on 16 December 1933, Robert W. Chambers had produced nearly 100 books (88 are listed in the British Library Catalogue in Britain alone). Sadly, only a very few dealt with the macabre.