Richard Yates

Richard Yates (3 February 1926 – 7 November 1992) was an American novelist and short story writer whose work — particularly Revolutionary Road (1961) and the story collection Eleven Kinds of Loneliness (1962) — constitutes the most devastating portrait of American middle-class disappointment in postwar fiction. Yates wrote about ordinary people whose lives fail to match their expectations — not dramatically, not tragically, but in the accumulating small defeats that constitute most human unhappiness. He died in obscurity in 1992, his books out of print, his name largely forgotten. The posthumous revival — led by writers like Richard Ford, Stewart O’Nan, and Blake Bailey, whose 2003 biography A Tragic Honesty restored Yates to critical attention — has established him as one of the most important American realist writers of the twentieth century.

Life and Career

Yates was born in Yonkers, New York, the son of a failed concert singer and a minor business executive whose marriage collapsed during the Depression. His childhood was marked by poverty, his mother’s alcoholism and artistic pretensions, and a period in a tuberculosis sanatorium — experiences that fed directly into his fiction. He served in the Army during World War II (he fought in France and Germany), contracted tuberculosis, and spent months in military hospitals.

After the war, he worked as a journalist, a publicity writer for Remington Rand, and a speechwriter for Robert F. Kennedy during the 1963 Senate campaign. He taught creative writing at a succession of universities — Columbia, Iowa, Boston University, Emerson, Wichita State — never holding a permanent position. He drank heavily throughout his life, smoked incessantly, and died of emphysema and complications of surgery at sixty-six, alone in a rented apartment in Birmingham, Alabama.

Revolutionary Road (1961) — his debut novel — follows Frank and April Wheeler, a young couple in 1955 suburban Connecticut who believe they are superior to their neighbours and plan to escape to Paris, where they will discover their true selves. The plan collapses, the marriage collapses, and the novel becomes a merciless anatomy of self-deception and the uses people make of each other. The novel was a finalist for the National Book Award (it lost to Walker Percy’s The Moviegoer), was praised by Tennessee Williams and William Styron, and seemed poised to make Yates famous. It didn’t. The 2008 film adaptation, directed by Sam Mendes and starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet, finally brought it to a wide audience.

Eleven Kinds of Loneliness (1962) — his first story collection — contains some of the finest American short stories of the century. “The Best of Everything” (about a secretary preparing for a marriage she already senses will fail), “Doctor Jack-o’-Lantern” (about a poor boy’s humiliation in a new school), and “Builders” (about a ghostwriting assignment that reveals the impossibility of anyone telling their own story) are models of realist fiction at its most precise and devastating.

His subsequent novels — A Special Providence (1969), Disturbing the Peace (1975), The Easter Parade (1976), A Good School (1978), Young Hearts Crying (1984), and Cold Spring Harbor (1986) — were published to shrinking audiences and diminishing reviews. The Easter Parade — about two sisters whose lives of quiet disappointment span decades — is probably his second-best novel. Young Hearts Crying — about an aspiring poet and his wealthy wife — is his longest and most ambitious. None sold well. By the mid-1980s, Yates was effectively a forgotten writer.

Themes and Style

Yates wrote about the gap between aspiration and reality — the specific American tragedy of people who believe they deserve better lives than the ones they have and who use that belief as a defence against self-knowledge. His characters are not villains or fools: they are recognisable, sympathetic people whose failures are the failures of imagination and courage that most readers will recognise in themselves.

His prose style is deliberately invisible — clean, precise, unshowy realist prose that lets the reader’s attention rest entirely on the characters and their situations. He admired Fitzgerald and Flaubert, and like both, he is a master of the scene that reveals character through speech and gesture rather than psychological explanation.

Critical Standing

The Yates revival is one of the most dramatic posthumous rehabilitations in American letters. Revolutionary Road is now taught alongside The Great Gatsby and The Age of Innocence as one of the essential novels of American disillusionment. The advocacy of Ford, O’Nan, and Bailey, combined with the Mendes film, brought Yates back into print and into the canon.

Key Works

• Revolutionary Road (1961)
• Eleven Kinds of Loneliness (1962)
• The Easter Parade (1976)
• Young Hearts Crying (1984)

Collecting Yates

Revolutionary Road (1961, Little, Brown and Company, Boston) — fine first editions in the Arthur Hawkins Jr. dust jacket bring $1,000–$4,000. The post-2008 film revival increased demand substantially. Eleven Kinds of Loneliness (1962, Little, Brown) brings $300–$800. The Easter Parade (1976, Delacorte) brings $100–$300. Yates signed sparingly; inscribed copies are rare and highly valued.