Eleven Kinds of Loneliness (1962) Signed First Edition Reference

Eleven Kinds of Loneliness is Richard Yates’s first story collection, published by Little, Brown in 1962, one year after Revolutionary Road. The eleven stories — all previously published in magazines including The New Yorker, Esquire, and The Atlantic Monthly — form a portrait of postwar American disappointment that is as unified and devastating as any novel. The collection is regularly cited alongside Hemingway’s In Our Time, Cheever’s The Stories of John Cheever, and Carver’s What We Talk About When We Talk About Love as one of the essential American story collections of the century.

The Collection

The stories range across the American social landscape of the 1950s: a tuberculosis ward, an Army base, a failing marriage in the suburbs, a schoolroom, a construction site. What connects them is Yates’s unfailing attention to the way people deceive themselves about their circumstances and their relationships, and the quiet, accumulating damage that self-deception inflicts.

Standout stories include “The Best of Everything” — about a young woman’s disillusionment on the eve of her wedding — and “Builders” — about a hack writer’s relationship with a taxi driver who wants to be an author. Every story in the collection operates at a level of craft that most writers achieve only occasionally, and the cumulative effect is overwhelming.

First Edition Identification

Publisher: Little, Brown and Company, Boston Publication date: 1962 Copyright page: First edition identification per Little, Brown convention First printing: Very small — story collections by debut authors in the early 1960s had tiny print runs

Signed Copy Market

• Signed first edition: Extraordinarily rare — possibly rarer than signed Revolutionary Road first editions
• Unsigned first edition, fine/fine: $1,000–$3,000
• Unsigned first edition, very good: $300–$800

Eleven Kinds of Loneliness may be the single rarest title in the Yates collecting universe. Story collections were printed in smaller quantities than novels in 1962, the book sold even worse than Revolutionary Road, and signed copies are almost nonexistent. An authenticated signed first would be a major event in the Yates collecting world.

Collecting Position

For collectors who value short fiction, Eleven Kinds of Loneliness is the Yates title to own — ahead of even Revolutionary Road. The collection demonstrates Yates’s mastery of the short story form with a consistency that few American writers have matched, and its scarcity in first edition form makes it one of the most challenging acquisitions in postwar American book collecting.

The book has been reprinted in various formats over the decades, most recently under Vintage’s Contemporaries imprint. These later editions are reading copies, not collectible first editions, and should not be confused with the Little, Brown original.