Barbarians

Robert William Chambers (1865-1933) was an American artist and fiction writer, best known for his collection of connected stories The King in Yellow (1895), which has been described as one of the most important works of American supernatural fiction. Born in Brooklyn, New York, at around the age of 20 he entered the Art Students’ League alongside fellow student Charles Dana Gibson, and from 1886-93 studied at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts and Academie Julian in Paris. On his return to New York he succeeded in selling his illustrations to Life, Truth and Vogue magazines, but then devoted his time to writing, producing his first novel In the Quarter in 1894. He wrote in several genres, including both historical and contemporary fiction, and returned to the weird and supernatural in further short story collections, though the latter did not achieve the level of success of The King in Yellow. During WWI he turned to adventure and war stories but after 1924 devoted himself solely to historical novels. Barbarians (1917), set during the early years of WWI, tells the story of of a group of 12 men, eight Americans, three Frenchmen, and a Belgian, whose common cause is to fight for the freedom of the world at a time when the US had yet to enter the war. One of the characters, Jim Neeland, had already appeared in another of Chambers’s works, The Dark Star. The adventures of these brave, reckless, idealistic men, singly or in groups, are played out along the whole western battle front, from the Belgian coast to the mountains of Alsace, and the reader is given a vivid insight into life in the trenches, and in the little towns just inside the lines of battle. Reprinted from the A L Burt edition that includes a frontispiece by the American painter and illustrator Arthur I Keller (1867-1924).