American author, born in New York in 1865, the son of a prominent member of the New York bar. In 1885 he went to Paris to study art, exhibiting in the Salon of 1889, and in eight years spent in Europe gathering the material for his future works. His Red Republic, a vivid, realistic, and in some ways the most valuable, account of the Commune that has been written, was one of the results of his visit to Europe. His first story, In the Quarter, was published in 1894, followed by The King in Yellow, a collection of remarkable short stories issued in the same year. Their power and originality was unmistakable. A vein of weirdness running through them all challenged attention and caused some of the critics to call him a decadent. Then came A King and a Few Dukes and The Maker of Moons, the latter a collection of eight remarkable short stories. The Red Republic, coming after these, established Mr. Chambers’s position as a writer of fiction of merit and considerable worth. See also “The Recruit,” “Eily Considine,” The Fighting Chance and The Firing Line.
