The King in Yellow - Chambers, Robert W

. .

Résumé :
The King in Yellow is a collection of ten interconnected stories that explore the despair and madness that characters experience when they come into contact with the forbidden play, The King in Yellow. One of the best examples of Victorian-gothic horror, it is widely regarded. Robert W. Chambers' collection of short stories, The King in Yellow, was first released by F. Tennyson Neely in 1895. The title of the book is taken from a play of the same name, which appears throughout some of the stories as a motif. Three main devices serve as a loose connection between the first four stories: The King in Yellow is a play that was published as a book. The King in Yellow is a supernatural, Gothic being that is enigmatic and evil. a sinister icon known as the Yellow Sign These macabre tales have a similar focus on characters who are frequently artists or decadents who live in the demi-monde to the other tales in the collection. Throughout the remaining stories, the macabre character gradually disappears, and the final three are written in the romantic fiction style that is characteristic of Chambers' later work. Due to their Parisian settings and artistic protagonists, they are all connected to the stories that came before them....

Biographie:
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 ?cole des Beaux-Arts and at Acad?mie 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.

Sommaire:
Robert William Chambers was an American artist and writer who was born May 26, 1865, and died December 16, 1933. He is best known for his 1895 collection of short stories called The King in Yellow. Born in Brooklyn, New York, Chambers was the son of William P. Chambers (1827-1911), a business and bankruptcy lawyer, and Caroline Smith Boughton. When his mom was twelve, William P. was an intern with her famous business lawyer father, Joseph Boughton. This is how his parents met. In the end, they joined forces to start the law firm of Chambers and Boughton. It did well even after Joseph's death in 1861. The great-grandfather of Robert Chambers was a sailor in the British Royal Navy named William Chambers. He married Amelia Saunders (1765-1822), who was the great-granddaughter of Tobias Saunders of Westerly, Rhode Island. First, they moved from Westerly to Greenfield, Massachusetts. Then they moved to Galway, New York, where they had their son, also named William Chambers (1798-1874). The second William finished from Union College when he was 18. He then went to a college in Boston to study medicine. While he was still in school, he married Eliza P. Allen (1793-1880), who was a direct daughter of Roger Williams, who founded Providence, Rhode Island. They were some of the first people to live in Broadalbin, New York. Walt Boughton Chambers was his brother and a builder....