The first time I tried to read Revolutionary Road, Richard Yates's first and most famous novel, I couldn't finish it. Too depressing. I was a few years out of college and my life wasn't going the way I wanted it to. Like Frank Wheeler in the novel, I'd spent a year or so as a kind of self-styled "knockabout intellectual" in New York, working at crap jobs, reading books, and trying to be a writer. Then I got a full-time job and had less time for writing, thank God; pretending to be a writer was a lot more fun. Around that time I tried and failed to read Revolutionary Road.

Years later, as Yates's biographer, I discovered a fan letter among his papers that expressed how I felt in those days (and perhaps still feel). It was from a suburban father of two named Donn C. McInturff, who'd just finished Revolutionary Road. He wondered if it was a true story: "If this was indeed your existence" (that is, a life of quiet desperation in the suburbs of Connecticut), "did you manage to escape from it to get your book written? Was it to Paris?" McInturff was a tormented man. Despite what he described as "an excellent credit rating," he was "starving from the inside"; he wanted to sell his house and move far away, to "pound out this novel that lives within." I imagine it didn't work out, though I hope he had better luck than the Wheelers.

A few years after I left New York, I decided to give Revolutionary Road another try. By then my life was a little better. I was about to publish my first book and, amid a dribble of freelance work, odd jobs, and whatnot, I was determined to pound out the novel that lived within. Yates's protagonist Frank had wanted to do that too, but suddenly his prospects improved as a writer of "sales promotion" and he changed his mind-whereupon his disillusioned wife died after a self-administered abortion and Frank was reduced to "a walking, talking, smiling, lifeless man." So I read, wincing.

In the midst of Revolutionary Road I'd sometimes have to pause for air, and I found myself staring a lot at that haunting Jill Krementz photo of the wasted Yates on the back covers of the later reprints. This was a guy who'd been really beaten up by life, I thought, and who surely wasn't long for this world. I had no idea that the photo in question was actually taken in 1980, twelve years before Yates finally expired, though much of what I dimly surmised about the man would prove to be true, more or less, only worse. For reasons that are tiresome to go into, I decided to write a biography of Yates. Suffice to say I read the rest of his work and became a great admirer, so much so that I was moved to fill the vacuum of critical appreciation with a long essay in the Dictionary of Literary Biography. At the time Yates made other American writers seem a bit silly, even so-called canonical writers whom I (and Yates) revered. It's fun to identify with handsome, heedless romantics who come to a bad (but glamorous) end, or stoical mavericks who are graceful under pressure, or sensitive youths who are too fine for this world, so Fitzgerald and Hemingway and Salinger stay in print. Yates left his romanticism behind in his youth -- arguably where it belongs -- and wrote about the rest of humanity: the mediocrities and strivers who pretend to be something they're not because life is lonely and dull and disappointing. "They're not going to Europe, are they?" a friend sighed after the first hundred pages of Revolutionary Road. "No," I replied, "but keep reading."

That's what I wanted to tell the world: keep reading, nobody ever died from knowing the worst ("Mithradates, he died old"), and if the truth depresses you, well, what about Yates's craftsmanship? What about his status as a "writer's writer" (that awful compliment)? There are all sorts of reasons to read Yates, whether one is a writer or not, and yet even bookish people tend to have no idea who he is. So I decided to write a biography. What else was I going to do?

The first thing I did was call Steven Goldleaf, a professor at Pace and co-author of an excellent monograph on Yates's work in the Twayne's United States Authors series. The book had been published a couple of years before, so I thought Goldleaf might know whether a biography was in progress (the second chapter of his Twayne book is an overview of what was then the few known facts of Yates's life). Goldleaf didn't know of any biography, though I got the impression he'd considered writing one himself.

"There's a great story to be told there," he said, "and I hope you can pull it off, but I wouldn't recommend it. The daughter, Monica--"

He said a number of things about Monica, Yates's middle daughter and executor, the gist of it being that she was difficult. "Maybe we just didn't hit it off," he laughed, and warned me not to mention his name if I wanted to get anywhere with her. As a sort of sop, he pointed out that Yates's older daughter, Sharon, was a "very sweet lady."

I decided to call Sharon first. She turned out to be a middle-aged school teacher who lived with her husband and two children in Brooklyn, and she spoke in a high-pitched outer-boroughs accent that put me in mind of Edith Bunker, or one of those New York "working gals" in her father's collection, Eleven Kinds of Loneliness. "You wanna write a book about Dad?" she asked. Then, after a bemused pause: "Is he still in print?" It was a good question; the latest Vintage reprints had appeared almost ten years before. Was it possible I was proposing a biography of a writer whose every single book was out of print? I decided to think about that later, babbling about her father's small but devoted following and asking whether she thought Monica would have any qualms. "Monica? Nah. You got her number? Here, lemme give it to you . . ."

Goldleaf had scared the hell out of me about Monica, so I spent the next few days dithering around the phone like a pimply teenager working up the nerve to get a prom date.

"Oh really?" said Monica when I told her why I was calling. "Well, that's -- interesting." She sounded nothing like her sister. Her voice had a wavering, woeful quality, as if she were just coming out of a crying jag; there was no discernible accent. (Later I heard a tape of Yates reading his story, "Doctor Jack-o'-Lantern," which was kind of like listening to Monica at half-speed, or the actor Donald Sutherland in a depressed mood.) Suddenly she switched to a rapid falsetto: "What do you want? You want a cookie? You want a cookie before dinner?" I soon gathered that she had small children swarming around her at all times, and that she addressed them and me with little or no transition; sometimes, when transcribing an interview, I'd find myself typing "Go to bed" or "Wash your hands."

Abruptly her voice flattened and I realized she was talking to me again. "So, tell me about yourself." I told her a few things, mentioning the piece I'd written for the Dictionary of Literary Biography. "Mm," she said. "Really? That's nice." She sighed. "So what, you're an academic?" It was a ticklish subject, since even then I was thinking about going back and getting my Ph.D., but I decided to say no. "I've written a few academic things," I replied (I may have said "scholarly"), "but really I'm just a freelancer of sorts." I expected her to get rid of me then and there, but she seemed glad to hear it. In fact, she hated professional critics, particularly those with academic credentials. She blamed them, to a large degree, for her father's neglected reputation. "They're Yates characters," she told me. "You know? People who hide their insecurities but are cringing inside." She had a point there and I said so. We got along fine after that.

Prior to writing a proposal, I did about six hours of interviews with Sharon and Monica. I was startled by their candor. "He wasn't well even when he was well," said Sharon of her father's mental illness. "Listen, you have to understand," Monica insisted, impatient for me to "get it"; "Dad didn't notice other people. he picked up on asshole people, he could figure people out in general, but in another way he saw himself projected out..." The two daughters told a fascinating story, the very story Yates himself had told, in bits and pieces, over the course of nine books. It was all true: the crazy, impecunious, sculptor-manque mother; the "funny little prep school" where Yates (à la his alter ego Bill Grove) had been held down and molested by bigger, richer boys; the bumbling stint overseas in WWII; the long months in a Staten Island tuberculosis ward; the alcoholic sister whose husband beat her; the early marriage, Paris, the Riviera, the Connecticut suburbs, Bellevue, Hollywood, on and on ...

And there was more! For six months Yates had been sole speechwriter for Robert F. Kennedy, author of the man's most moving speeches on civil rights (an experience Yates spent the last six years of his life trying to record in his unfinished novel, Uncertain Times). He even inspired an episode of Seinfeld, "The Jacket," in which Jerry meets Elaine's gruff, drunken, novelist father, based on a memorable encounter between Yates and the show's co-creator, Larry David, who had dated Monica for a time. And it appeared that Yates's real-life Weltanschauung was every bit as bleak as his fiction. To give a random example, when he was dying of emphysema the heartbroken Monica begged him to reassure her that some sort of afterlife existed so they could be reunited. "Nah, baby," Yates wheezed, "just blackness."

Indeed, to no small degree, the man's pessimism had rubbed off on his middle daughter. "You really want to write this book?" Monica asked, at the end of an interview. "I mean," she sighed deeply, "Dad didn't have much of a life."

Was she kidding? "It's fascinating!" I said. "It's incredible!"

"If you say so. Mommy's talking on the phone. What? You want to watch the cartoons? . . ."

I was fizzing with excitement as I got to work on the proposal. It took me two months. One problem was the sheer wealth of material. There was the research I'd done for my DLB essay, plus interview transcripts and almost 300 pages of stuff that Professor Goldleaf had sent me, gratis and good luck, when I told him I was going ahead. And then there was the actual writing. The first ten pages alone -- the "pitch" part of the proposal where I explain to publishers why they should buy this book -- took me almost a month. I pointed out that Yates had written several classics (none of which sold worth a damn); I mentioned RFK, Hollywood, Seinfeld, and so on; I flogged the more lurid aspects of the story, such as mental illness and alcoholism, while stressing, too, that Yates was a consummate gentleman. And, finally, I returned to the fact that he was a writer of greatness, canonical greatness, a writer to whom the whole literary establishment owed a big fat apology. I quoted his friend and publisher Seymour Lawrence: "He drank too much, he smoked too much, he was accident-prone, he led an itinerant life, but as a writer he was all in place."

The finished proposal, I thought, was the best thing I'd ever done, and my agent agreed.

"It's a good proposal," she said. "I might be able to sell this." Then she told me about the lousy sales of most literary biographies and advised me not to get my hopes up.

As it turned out, though, the time was ripe. Two weeks later, Richard Ford's introduction to a new Vintage edition of Revolutionary Road appeared in the New York Times Book Review, and meanwhile Holt and Houghton-Mifflin were bidding for a volume of Yates's collected stories. Editors at both houses had read my proposal and liked it; both promised my agent that if they got the stories, they'd also buy my biography as part of the deal. The problem was Monica: she wanted more money for the stories. She was holding out.

"Don't worry about it," she said, when I told her, anxiously, what was at stake. "The reason Dad's books didn't sell was because he settled for peanuts. They won't push a book unless they have to pay real money for it."

In the end Holt raised its bid and got the stories. The bad news was that no money was left over for my biography.

Time passed. For a while I did some more desultory work on Yates--going to the library, typing up notes--then I thought the hell with it. Nobody was paying me for this. My agent assured me the proposal was still making the rounds: it was at Wiley, it was at Norton, people were interested. I got married in Scotland and spent long, petulant afternoons in Tobermory, London, Paris, Madrid, haunting Internet cafés in the hope of good news. "I came so close," I'd maunder to my wife after a certain number of drinks.

One day, a few months after I'd given up hope, I was stuck in traffic and started glancing at the contents of the latest New Yorker. The issue's fiction was by a dead writer, Richard Yates, whose two great ambitions in life (I knew) had been (1) a review on the front page of the New York Times Book Review, and (2) a story in The New Yorker. The first ambition had been thwarted by a newspaper strike that bumped a front-page review of The Easter Parade to page four, and the second ambition had just been fulfilled eight years too late for Yates to enjoy it. I dropped whatever I was doing and drove home to e-mail my agent: "Have you seen The New Yorker?"

A couple weeks later she sold my biography to Picador, a division of the same German conglomerate that owns Holt, the house that had dashed my hopes some eight months before. My luck and Yates's appeared to be changing.

"Why d'you want to write a book about Dick Yates?" snapped his old friend Seymour Epstein, a somewhat neglected writer now in his late seventies. He was unaware of the revival of interest in Yates's work, though he remembered the man well enough. "Dick was like a Janus head," he said. "Two different people." Epstein conceded that one of these people was "charming and honorable," a man who was always willing to help a fellow writer; the other person, however, was an "emotional parasite" who went around "bleeding on people." As I knew from my talks with his daughters, a deep ambivalence toward Yates was almost inevitable ("[He was] the sad, clingy one you loved helplessly as a child," said Monica, "and grew impatient with when you were grown up"), though I was often amazed by the breadth of the paradox.

"He was princely," said the poet Grace Schulman, Yates's best friend (with her husband Jerry) for most of the sixties. During that first interview, especially, she took great pains to convey the magnitude of the man's nobility. "Dick was always trying to define what was true, what was right," she said, and when I quoted Monica's remark about his self-absorption ("Dad didn't notice other people"), Schulman was taken aback. Nothing could be further from the truth! Her voice trembled as she remembered how she and Jerry would confide their most intimate secrets to Yates, who would sometimes abruptly excuse himself to take a walk and think things over. "I've emerged with a fresh insight into your problem," he'd announce on his return. "We never had a friend like that," said Grace, "before or after."

She sent me copies of Yates's letters, which spanned the ten years of the friendship from 1961-71. I noticed, reading them, that Yates tended to apologize a lot: in one case he felt like a "turd," he wrote, for "having scrawled those inept and booze-soaked half-assed 'comments' all over your manuscript." That one was representative, so I asked Grace about it. A silence passed while she tried to remember. Then--in a thin, angry voice I hadn't heard before--she spoke of how Yates had discouraged her as a fiction writer by blackening the last story she ever wrote with derisive marginalia. This started a whole new chain of memories: "The seeds of estrangement were planted from the beginning," she noted bitterly. There was the time she got him a job interview with her mentor at Bard College, the poet Theodore Weiss, who made the mistake of asking Yates not to smoke. Not only did Yates defy this modest request, he made a point of flinging ashes all over Weiss's living room while the mortified Schulmans watched. Finally he put his head down on Weiss's coffee table and went to sleep. There was also the time Grace observed him arguing with a pregnant woman over who was more deserving of a Guggenheim: "I've got great recommendations," said Yates; "So do I," the woman replied; "Well"--Yates paused--"but you're a girl, and you've got a baby." There were the many, many times he got drunk, lost his temper, kicked and threw and burnt holes in the furniture, mocked certain motifs in Grace's poetry ("Oh, that tree thing"), and so on. Though both Schulmans remained unfailingly helpful to me, by the end of our talks Grace seemed a little exasperated with the subject.

"Knowing you both was one of the very few things that kept me sane during all those frantic, dismal years of my second bachelorhood," Yates had written the couple in his last letter from 1971. "Please don't ever forget that, either of you."

Apart from the odd caustic remark for her daughters' benefit, Yates's first wife Sheila didn't like to talk about her ex-husband. At Monica's wedding reception in 1995, the New York Times editor Harvey Shapiro had tried introducing himself to the bride's mother: "Hi, I'm Harvey Shapiro. I knew your husband." Sheila gave him a hard stare and walked away.

If I couldn't get Sheila to talk to me, I was screwed. It was one of Goldleaf's caveats: "Forget Monica, you'll never get Sheila to cooperate." She was the only significant witness to a number of crucial episodes in Yates's life: his long, lonely apprenticeship in the Village, the TB ward, the years in Europe, and so on. She was the model for the doomed April Wheeler in Revolutionary Road, while her own life (quite apart from Yates's role in it) was itself the stuff of novels. Her father was a second-rate British actor named Charles Bryant, whose one claim to fame was his involvement with the great theater and silent-movie actress Alla Nazimova, whose career he wrecked by marrying Sheila's mother while he was still allegedly married to Nazimova. In fact the latter was a lesbian (insofar as she bothered), and Bryant was her amiable beard and "business manager"; they'd never been married in the first place, hence the scandal.

Sheila was a retired teacher living in Westchester, and at length her daughters persuaded her to talk to me. She wasn't quite what I expected. April Wheeler is romantic, wistfully intellectual, given to a kind of weary toughness when her dreams are dashed. It occurred to me that Sheila was somewhat like the "tough" April--or rather what April might have become if she hadn't killed herself: level-headed, briskly pleasant, detached. Her daughters told me that Sheila rarely read books anymore; she worked on crosswords and "puttered about." Her voice was almost identical to Sharon's, but older, and for some reason I pictured her as a matron from a Gary Larson cartoon: beehive hairdo, cat-eye glasses, sensible dress. She spoke of her ex-husband as if he were a brand of laundry detergent she'd stopped using.

"When he was really being dopey," she said with neutral amusement, "he had this big thing about how he had to drive the car, no woman could help him."

Mostly, though, she liked sticking to facts: the exact address of her mother's old apartment on East Sixty-first; the name of the fellow who'd introduced her to Yates; the intricacies of the obsolete pneumothorax treatment for TB--"the idea was to collapse the lung, see, so it can rest; this was before Isoniazid, I think." Could she spell that? "I-S-O-N-I-A-Z-I-D."

Talk of Yates's fiction left her cold. After eleven years of watching the man hunched over a table amid a pall of cigarette smoke, while he winced with the sweet pain of creation or simply died for a drink, Sheila had lost her yen for the literary life. She claimed never to have finished Revolutionary Road. "I couldn't take the constant agonizing over every word of it," she said. "I had other interests by then." When I asked whether a cabbie had actually hired Yates as a ghostwriter (as suggested by his avowedly autobiographical 1961 story "Builders"), she was briefly surprised. "You know, I'd forgotten about that. But yeah, yeah . . . Mm." She sighed at the folly of it all-their marriage, la vie boheme, everything--and wondered how I'd found out about that whole cabbie business, since she herself had forgotten it long ago. I mentioned "Builders" (she'd never heard of it) and added, "He also wrote a story called 'Regards at Home' that covers, you know, kind of that same time period." Silence. "You appear as a character named Eileen." Silence--maybe an impassive "Mm." Our time was up. Part of my deal with Sheila was that I had to limit our interviews to half an hour, tops; if I let a session run long (usually while trying to lure her into more intimate territory), she was liable to ignore the phone for a few weeks.

In her daughter Sharon's basement--along with Yates's ashes (still in their original shipping box)--are the letters, lists, memos, fragments and so forth that Yates had saved over the years, though toward the end he remarked, "I should throw this shit out." On a day when I'd scheduled another interview with Sheila, the first installment of these papers, nicely xeroxed, arrived from Brooklyn in a large filebox. There were hundreds of pages of letters from the young Sheila alone, and I read these in a state of electric alertness--here at last was the woman evoked in Revolutionary Road!--pausing only to make a quick call to the laconic, latter-day version who lived in Westchester. I canceled our interview that evening; I wouldn't have to bother her for a few days, I said, since I needed to process some new material that would help, ah, focus my questions somewhat. "Oh, really?" said Sheila. "Well. Okay, then."

Later that afternoon, Monica called.

"You told Mom about the letters?"

"Not exactly. I said I needed some--that I'd gotten some new--"

She sighed. "Well I think she figured it out. Sharon says she's really mad. You know" (she mimicked her mother), "'Did you give that guy my letters? Those are private!'"

"What did Sharon tell her?"

"She said she just sent you a bunch of papers, she wasn't sure what. Mom said, 'Well if he asks me about certain things, I'll know.'"

So I never alluded to the letters with Sheila, who seemed to forget all about them; still, I knew the story they told, and this led me to press a bit harder when trying to get to the bottom of, say, Yates's sudden descent into hardcore alcoholism after the mid-fifties. Sheila was glad to refer, obliquely, to his being "saturated with booze" and the like, but when I tried to explore the why, the process, the details, she'd give the verbal equivalent of a shrug: "You know, he just drank it up." Once I wondered aloud if he'd ever become abusive while in his cups; it was clear I meant physically, since we'd already discussed his tendency to argue with a kind of cruel ingenuity ("He could talk rings around me and everyone else, drunk or sober").

"You can't..." Sheila's voice trailed off in a wondering way. "If you know anything about Dick Yates..." Again she paused. "He'd never do anything like that. It wasn't in him."

It was the closest she ever came to getting emotional.

The friends of Yates's youth weren't hard to find: he'd barely bothered to change their names in his novel A Good School, and once I got hold of an Avon Old Farms alumni directory, it wasn't much of a stretch to connect Harry Flynn to Terry Flynn, Lothar Candels to Lothar Brundels, Hugh Pratt to Hugh Britt, etc.

Most were unaware that Yates had written a novel about his Avon days, though they vividly remembered his literary aspirations. Said his classmate Gilman Ordway, "He might have been the only one of us who knew exactly what he wanted to do with his life--become a writer of fiction." Yates wrote almost every word of the school newspaper, much of the yearbook and literary magazine, and performed all his community service hours in the school's print shop. He also composed a fair amount of verse, and certainly he looked the part of the tortured poet, as he described his "gangly, dreary-looking" counterpart Bill Grove in A Good School, "The kid was a mess. His tweed suit hung greasy with lack of cleaning, his necktie was a twisted rag, his long fingernails were blue, and he needed a haircut."

"That's me all right," said Harry Flynn, cheerfully, when I told him of Terry Flynn's crooked pinkie in the novel. He'd never heard of A Good School and didn't seem particularly interested in reading it, despite his being the model for one of its main characters; this surprised me until I remembered Terry Flynn's severe dyslexia. When I mentioned the scene where a number of boys, most notably Terry, forcibly masturbate the Yates character, Harry Flynn stiffened: "Look, I'm happy to help you with this thing, but Dick Yates wasn't a big part of my life then and he isn't now, okay?" So did it happen? "I don't remember anything like that." But Flynn's old classmate, Irv Jennings, told a different story. They didn't actually masturbate Yates, he said; rather they poured hair tonic on his genitals to make (so the joke went) his sparse pubic hair grow. "I saw it from the hall," he snapped, when I asked if he'd held the victim down like Art Jennings in the novel. Unlike so many of the others, Irv Jennings had heard of A Good School but never bothered to read it. "The man wrote filth," he explained.

Lothar Candels, now a retired pediatrician in Avon, had read the novel with immense pleasure--in fact, he insisted on reading his favorite passages aloud to me. "That's so true," he'd chuckle now and then. "But exactly!" Candels spoke warmly of Yates ("a sensitive and very touching young man"), and mentioned how the latter had once confided, in the midst of an all-but-speechless funk, that he needed to see a psychiatrist. Indeed, several of Yates's old friends seemed vaguely haunted by his memory, though they'd fallen out of touch with him almost half a century ago. Hugh Pratt had gotten married shortly after the war, and while he was away at medical school Yates made a special trip to Rochester and left a wedding present with Pratt's mother. "I never heard from Dick again," said Pratt, bemused. "What became of him? How did he die?" I answered both questions as best I could. Pratt gave a shaky sigh. "Poor Dick."

There were hundreds of interviews, hundreds and hundreds of letters, and every working day I'd encounter a piece of information (or many) that intrigued me, that connected to something, that spurred me on. I can think of few things more rewarding, more fun really, than being the first biographer of a figure that evokes such fascination--an alcoholic, a manicdepressive, a decent man whose good looks, talent, discipline, and whatever else left him with nothing in the end. Not that Yates expected more; the whole idea of happiness was ridiculous to him. "Henry James spoke of the Obstinate finality of human being,'" said his friend David Milch, "and Dick was that. He was an aching example of what an artist is, and what being an artist doesn't solve in our human predicament."

And yet Yates had it in him to be happy, to be a giver of happiness. His second marriage to the young Martha Speer (bookended by mental collapse) made him happy for a time, radiantly so at their wedding in Iowa City, where his students stood outside the church and ecstatically pelted the couple with rice. ("We wanted him to have a happier life," said Robert Lehrman.) And what about his students? Teaching writing was another idea Yates found ridiculous, though he was devoted to his students and vice versa. "Sacred, sacred duty," said William Kittredge when I told him about my book. He remembered how Yates would look at him "with those sad old eyes," shaking his head, whenever Kittredge betrayed his talent, his craft, by writing what Yates considered a tricky, unfelt line of prose, and to this day Kittredge can't write such a line without hearing the master's voice: "For Christ's sake, Kittredge..." Any number of students and fellow writers feel the same way. Yates, for them, remains a kind of benevolent artistic conscience--a "guardian angel" (Gina Berriault), "one of the few good voices in my head" (DeWitt Henry), or, as Edwin Weihe put it, echoing Richard Ford, "the place you went back to."

I agree with all that, and now when I picture Yates, it's not as the craggy old martyr of the Krementz photo. I see him smiling the way his ghost might have smiled, in 1998, at his beloved youngest daughter Gina--the one he had with Martha--who was then hallucinating after a long bout of dysentery. "Is that all you want to know?" he said, when she asked him what the secret of being a great writer was. Smiling in the midst of that final blackness, Yates seemed to imply there were far more important things in life.

Copyright Harvard Review Fall 2003.