Just thought I'd post this since I came across it and in case anyone is interested in knowing about this month's author....
Author: Richard Yates (1926-1992)
Born: February 3, 1926; New York, New York
Died: November 7, 1992; Birmingham, Alabama
Principal Works
long fiction
The Stepdaughter, 1976
Great Granny Webster, 1977
The Fate of Mary Rose, 1981
Corrigan, 1984
miscellaneous
For All That I Found There, 1973
nonfiction
On the Perimeter, 1984
In the Pink: Caroline Blackwood on Hunting, 1987
The Last of the Duchess, 1995
nonfiction (cookbook; with Anna Haycraft)
Darling, You Shouldn’t Have Gone to So Much Trouble, 1980
short fiction
Liars in Love, 1981
Richard Yates was born on February 3, 1926, in Yonkers, New York. After graduation from a private school in Connecticut in 1944, he was drafted into the U.S. Army and served two years in Europe at the end of World War II. He was married and divorced twice, and had three daughters by his first wife.
Yates held a series of writing and teaching jobs until 1961, when his first novel, Revolutionary Road, was published, to immediate critical praise. Nominated for a National Book Award, it also helped Yates win a prestigious Guggenheim Fellowship. The next year, Yates's first story collection, Eleven Kinds of Loneliness: Short Stories, solidified his literary reputation. What followed was hardly the standard script for writers, however. None of the books he wrote in the next twenty-five years, neither his multiple novels nor another collection of short stories, lived up to the high expectations established by his first two works.
Yates struggled to earn a living. He worked as a speech writer for Robert Kennedy (1963), and as a screenwriter in Hollywood (he earned shared writing credit for the screenplay of A Bridge at Remagen, 1969). For some years after 1964, he taught at the prestigious Writers’ Workshop at the University of Iowa. He was also the editor of Stories for the Sixties (1963), and wrote William Styron's Lie Down in Darkness: A Screenplay (1985).
Yates's life was further plagued by alcoholism and bouts of mental illness, and he was hospitalized several times. When he died from the complications of emphysema in a Birmingham Veterans’ Administration hospital, on November 7, 1992, he was on a one-year teaching appointment at the University of Alabama. When The Collected Stories of Richard Yates (2001) was published posthumously a decade later, however, the reviews were consistently high, a final recognition of Yates's particular literary talents.
Yates's stories had appeared over his career in some of the best vehicles for short fiction (e.g., Esquire, the Saturday Evening Post), and the comparisons in the reviews of his work were often to F. Scott Fitzgerald, John O’Hara, John Updike, Joseph Heller, and the other great American realists of the twentieth century. Yates was a “writers’ writer,” a novelist and short-story writer absolutely dedicated to the craft of his fiction, which explains the praise from other writers (such as Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., Dorothy Parker, and Tennessee Williams) and his good grades as a writing teacher. Yates's best fiction (such as Revolutionary Road, or the often anthologized short story “A Really Good Jazz Piano”) reveals a remarkable level of intensity and sophistication. His themes are often sadness, desperation, disillusionment, or isolation, his characters often average Americans otherwise invisible, but his fiction holds a power few other American writers have achieved.
Essay by: David Peck
