The tunes you heard as you were arriving were all from the forties and fifties. Richard Yates knew the words, and I mean all the words, of so many of them. The happiest I ever saw him was when he was singing all the words, clever, witty, ironic, silly, sweet words, at a party. I asked our pianist here if he had read Richard Yates, or even heard of him. He confessed that he had not, but that after seeing a turnout as respectable as this one is, he was certainly going to remedy that situation.

We would not be here, and would have no superb life's work to celebrate, if it were not for a few publishers who felt honored by the opportunity to publish one of the purest American writers of this century, even though they knew they were going to lose a lot of money. Those who loved his work the most, and consequently lost the most money on him, were Seymour Lawrence and Helen Meyer. How do they feel now about the money they lost? They don't give a damn.

I sat next to Gloria Vanderbilt at a party one time. We are not lovers, by the way. Let me put that rumor to rest. She asked me what I just asked our pianist. She had read a book which she simply adored, The Easter Parade. I replied that Richard Yates was something of a friend of mine, and that he was presently living alone in Boston. That good woman soon afterwards went to Boston and took him to lunch.

Gloria Vanderbilt could tell the difference between good and bad writing. Most people can't. To be declared a good writer is an obscure honor nowadays, almost like being inducted into the Lacrosse Hall of Fame, which I believe is in Baltimore. Dick himself knew what a good writer he was, I am happy to say. He also knew the futility of being one, I think. In one of his stories, I remember, and maybe one of you scholars here can tell me which story, he tells of a virtually unknown author who is much admired by critics because he had published seven novels in which they had not been able to discover a single flaw. He was mocking himself, I think.

When I made a journey, a forced march, through all his books in preparation for these obsequies, not only did I fail to detect so much as an injudiciously applied semicolon; I did not find even one paragraph which, if it were read to you today, would not wow you with its power, intelligence, and clarity. It has been said even that Homer occasionally nodded. As nearly as I can determine, Richard Yates's concentration when he was writing was so extraordinary that he never did.

He yearned to live as F. Scott Fitzgerald lived when Fitzgerald was rich and famous and young, to jump into the Plaza fountain with his clothes on and his pockets stuffed with paper money. That sort of thing. As the photograph here demonstrates, he was as good looking as Fitzgerald. He was as tall and skinny too.

I submit to you that he was a more careful writer than Fitzgerald, and one who was even more cunningly observant. he is not nearly so famous as Fitzgerald because he did not work with a glamorous cast: Hemingway, Gertrude Stein, Picasso, Gay Paree. Unlike Fitzgerald and Hemingway, he had to endure the humiliating and dreary ordeal of being a foot soldier in combat day after day. Unlike them he did not and could not run away from middle-class life in America. So that is what he wrote about. And like another outsider, Tennessee Williams, he celebrated the utterly unglamorous gallantry of Americans who had not and could not amount to much.

He and I became friends when we were teachers at the Writers' Workshop in Iowa City in the 1960s. One of our colleagues was Nelson Algren, another world-class story-teller and outsider who died broke, but who was more famous than Dick because he had made love to Simone de Beauvoir. These things matter