Richard Yates

Richard Yates (born February 3, 1926, Yonkers, New York, U.S.—died November 7, 1992, Birmingham, Alabama) was an American writer of novels and short stories. Yates was a realist whose works were mostly set in New York or New England and explored the aspirations and disappointments of middle-class people during the post-1945 “Age of Anxiety.” He has often been considered a “writer’s writer” who garnered acclaim from his literary colleagues but lacked commercial success during his lifetime. In the 21st century interest in his work has undergone a major revival.

Life and work

Yates’s childhood was marked by instability: Following his parents’ divorce when he was three years old, he lived with his mother and sister, moving around frequently in the New York City metropolitan area. After finishing high school, Yates joined the U.S. Army in 1944 and served in Europe. He spent the early postwar period in both Europe and New York. Much of his career in the 1950s was devoted to various writing jobs, including for the Remington Rand Corporation, as well as teaching and ghostwriting.

Yates’s first and most famous novel, Revolutionary Road, was published in 1961. It is a tragic and psychologically penetrating depiction of a young couple living in a Connecticut suburb of New York City; they find themselves unable to fulfill their dreams and struggle to adjust to the limitations of their existence. The book received high critical praise and was one of the finalists for the National Book Award. The next year, Yates followed up this success with the short-story collection Eleven Kinds of Loneliness, which likewise won critical acclaim.

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In both his life and his writing, Yates struggled after these initial successes. He took a variety of jobs to support himself. In the 1960s he worked as a speechwriter for Robert F. Kennedy and spent some time as a screenwriter in Hollywood. He later held several university teaching positions, including one at the prestigious University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Yates was plagued by chronic bad health. He was a heavy smoker and drinker, and recurrent struggles with bipolar disorder led to repeated hospitalizations. These problems affected his personal relationships; he was married twice and divorced twice, and his erratic, self-destructive behavior frequently disturbed his friends and colleagues.

Yates’s second novel, A Special Providence, was published in 1969. Based on his wartime experiences, it sold poorly and failed to gain the critical plaudits that Revolutionary Road had enjoyed. He published two further novels in the 1970s. The second of these, The Easter Parade (1976), is widely considered one of his finest, along with Revolutionary Road. It tracks the lives and troubles of two sisters over a period of more than 40 years. Yates brought out three more novels in the 1980s, along with another book of short stories, Liars in Love (1981). He died of complications from emphysema in 1992 while working in the last of his temporary academic posts—a one-year teaching position at the University of Alabama.

Revival and reputation

By the time of his death, Yates’s books had gone out of print. The situation began to change when the novelist Stewart O’Nan published an influential essay in the Boston Review in 1999, arguing for Yates as a canonical American author. A full-scale biography by Blake Bailey was published in 2003, and all of Yates’s books have since been reissued. Revolutionary Road received a highly praised film adaptation in 2008, directed by Sam Mendes and starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet. Yates himself has always maintained a high reputation among his fellow writers; major figures who followed in his wake, such as Raymond Carver, Ann Beattie, and Richard Ford, have recognized his influence. Many writers and critics have noted the bleakness at the heart of his work: Joyce Carol Oates commented that Yates created “a sad, gray, deathly world.” Summing up his own work, Yates said in an interview: “If my work has a theme, I suspect it is a simple one: that most human beings are inescapably alone, and therein lies their tragedy.”