At the time of his death in 1992, Richard Yates was remembered only vaguely for his first novel, Revolutionary Road, which in 1961 placed second to Walker Percy's The Moviegoer for the National Book Award. Despite a literary output of seven novels, including The Easter Parade (1976) and A Good School (1978), and two collections of short stories, notably Eleven Kinds of Loneliness (1962) and Liars in Love (1981), Yates was a forlorn and forgotten figure at the end of his life, with his books out of print.

Nearly a decade later a Yates revival was initiated by the publication of The Collected Stories of Richard Yates, which became a national bestseller and prompted new editions of his better novels. The Collected Stories includes everything in his short story collections as well as nine uncollected stories. An admiring introduction by Richard Russo provides a useful context for appreciating Yates's short fiction, particularly his indebtedness to Fitzgerald and his place in the history of the short story from Chekhov to Raymond Carver. Although never a commercial success, Yates was a meticulous craftsman who was widely regarded as a "writer's writer" by his contemporaries.

Yates drew unsparingly on his life for material, and readers of his short stories and novels will experience a special pleasure in reading Blake Bailey's timely and illuminating biography, A Tragic Honesty: The Life and Work of Richard Yates. Bailey draws judiciously and insightfully from interviews, letters, short stories, and novels, both to depict a detailed chronology of Yates's life and to demonstrate dramatically how his life experiences were creatively transformed in his fiction.

Born in 1926 in Yonkers, New York, Yates was only two when his parents divorced. He and his older sister were raised by a neurotic and alcoholic mother with pretensions as a sculptor. He attended prep school as a poor scholarship student and never went to college, but served in the infantry in Europe towards the end of World War II. After the war he worked at odd jobs, including a stint as a rewrite man for United Press, and in 1947 enrolled in evening creative writing courses at Columbia. In 1948 he entered into a troubled marriage with another loner, Sheila Bryant, producing two daughters, Sharon and Monica. He had weak lungs and in 1950 contracted tuberculosis, necessitating a long convalescence in a VA sanatorium, where he read extensively in English and American literature, especially his favorite F. Scott Fitzgerald. From 1951 to 1953 he and his family moved to France so he could become a writer. he wrote and sold some short stories, but upon returning to the U.S. took a job writing promotional material for Remington Rand to support his family.

Yates had a singularly unhappy life that was exacerbated by his charming yet destructive personality: he was an alcoholic who suffered from a bipolar disorder and smoked four packs a day. He and his wife were divorced in 1961, the year that he had a major nervous breakdown, but also the year that he finally won national recognition for his first novel, Revolutionary Road. It was nominated for a National Book Award and received lavish praise from fellow writers, notably William Styron, who read the galleys and pronounced it "a deft, ironic, beautiful novel that deserves to be a classic," and Tennessee Williams who was prompted to write: "If more is needed to make a masterpiece in modern American fiction, I am sure I don't know what it is."

Yates taught at the Iowa Writers Workshop from 1964 to 1971, and in 1968 married his second wife, the twenty-two-year-old Martha Speer, with whom he had another daughter. He and his wife and child returned to New York in 1974, but because of his heavy drinking and mental instability his second marriage ended in 1976. Yates then moved to Boston, where he lived from 1976 to 1988, teaching at Boston University, Emerson College, and Harvard Extension School. It proved to be a productive period for him as a writer: A Good School (1978), Liars in Love (1981), Young Hearts Crying (1984), and Cold Spring Harbor (1986). He later moved to Hollywood for a failed try at screenwriting, and died in a VA hospital in 1992, while serving as a visiting writer at the University of Alabama.

Yates's life informed his novels and short stories about the military, the corporate world, VA hospitals, suburban marriages, and the flawed American dream. There is a Chekhovian mood of sadness and fatalism in his stories that resonates with the reader because it is so powerfully presented and because Yates experienced it himself. He deserves to be read again and again because he is the literary laureate of the loners and losers of middle-class America at mid-century and after.


Copyright Harvard Review Fall 2003.