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eBook Category: General Nonfiction/Historical Fiction
eBook Description: A study of the work of Robert W. Chambers, author of The King in Yellow, with emphasis on his "Cardigan" series of historical novels, set in upstate New York during the American Revolution.

eBook Publisher: Marion Zimmer Bradley Literary Works Trust, Published: 1974
Fictionwise Release Date: May 2009

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Available eBook Formats [MultiFormat - What's this?]: eReader (PDB) [79 KB] , ePub (EPUB) [111 KB] , Rocket/REB1100 (RB) [35 KB] , Adobe Acrobat (PDF) [307 KB] , Palm Doc (PDB) [39 KB] , Microsoft Reader (LIT) [111 KB] , Franklin eBookMan (FUB) [107 KB] , hiebook (KML) [134 KB] , Sony Reader (LRF) [132 KB] , iSilo (PDB) [32 KB] , Mobipocket (PRC) [40 KB] , Kindle Compatible (MOBI) [101 KB] , OEBFF Format (IMP) [61 KB]
Words: 11097
Reading time: 31-44 min.
Microsoft Reader (LIT) Format: Printing DISABLED, Read-Aloud ENABLED
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All Other formats: Printing DISABLED, Read-aloud DISABLED

Chambers has today dropped into obscurity. My contention in this paper will be that this is not due to any lack of merit in his work, but a revolution in taste: that Chambers was a writer misplaced in time, a last offshoot of the late revival of romanticism, doomed to defeat by the surging forces of realism and naturalism.

No writers ever seem quite so dated as those of the age immediately preceding our own. The novels of Chambers (and a majority of them deal with New York society just before, during and after the Great War) just happened to be written at a time when realism and the Lost Generation were kicking over the traces. Compared with the sexual revolt of the Twenties and the grim naturalism of the Depression years, the novels of Chambers appear to belong to another age of the world. Romances, per se, had gone out of fashion, to be replaced by social problem novels. Chambers, who spoke of a writer's task as that of satisfying "the necessity for beauty", must have seemed frothy, escapist, and even (horror of horrors to the Stark School) sentimental.

To tastes formed by Steinbeck, Hemingway and Scott Fitzgerald, he appears to belong to a former age, if only because he did not cultivate the stripped-down prose and clipped, colloquial dialogue patterns of those writers. Chambers' style will be dealt with later. As the writers of the Twenties and Thirties gradually took over the critics and then the reading public, and almost convincing everyone that there was only one way to write and that the Heming-way, Chambers went on dwindling in popularity. He simply went out of style. He was dated, and not yet remote enough in time to be judged objectively. Not until several more fads in fiction have come and gone can any critic judge with objectivity whether Chambers was a good, a bad, or an indifferent writer.

The relativity of literary worth is apparent when we bear in mind that during the Eighteenth Century the poems of Abraham Cowley were universally regarded as greater than those of Milton, and that many critics of John Dryden's day hooted down the plays of Shakespeare because they were so obviously "crude" and did not conform to the "best" standards of classical drama. Today's Nobel Prize winner may someday be forgotten (to be "rediscovered" dramatically, centuries hence) and some popular pulp writer may emerge, someday, with a "compelling message" for the generation of 2263 and its unknown human problems.