Richard Yates
Richard Yates (born February 3, 1926 in Yonkers, New York - died November 7, 1992 in Birmingham) was a writer and educator, best known for the 1961 novel Revolutionary Road, an early reflection on the emptiness of suburban life.
Yates grew up in New York and graduated from the Avon Old Farms School in Avon, Connecticut. He served in the U. S. Army in World War II and contracted tuberculosis. He married Sheila Bryant in 1948 and moved to France, where he began writing for The Atlantic Monthly.
He returned to the United States in 1953 and began working in advertising, first for Remington Rand and then free-lance before going into teaching. He suffered a mental breakdown which led to divorce in 1960, and then completed his critically-acclaimed first novel, Revolutionary Road. The book was a finalist for the National Book Award, won that year by Walker Percy's The Moviegoer.
He was also a speechwriter for Attorney General Robert Kennedy during his brief time in office. After Kennedy's death in 1963 he moved to Hollywood to work on screenplays and taught at the Iowa Writers Workshop, where he met his second wife Martha Speers. He taught at several other colleges before moving to New York, where they divorced in 1975. The novelist then took a monthly salary from his publisher and enjoyed a productive period of writing, but continued disappointing sales.
In 1989 Yates was invited to serve as a visiting professor at the University of Alabama. He rented half of a duplex at 1104 Oakwood Court off Bryant Drive in Tuscaloosa. He remained in the sparse quarters to finish a novel based on his experiences as a speech-writer for Robert Kennedy. In a 1992 interview with the London Independent he described his surroundings: "OK to hole up in to write, I guess, but I sure as hell don't want to die here. It's Dixie." 1.
A chain smoker who suffered from severe emphysema, Yates died under the added strain of complications from hernia surgery at the Veterans Administration Medical Center in Birmingham in 1992. He was survived by three daughters and two grandchildren.
Books
- Yates, Richard (1961) Revolutionary Road. New York: Atlantic-Little, Brown
- Yates, Richard (1962) Eleven Kinds of Loneliness (short stories). New York: Seymour Lawrence / Delacorte
- Yates, Richard (1969) A Special Providence. New York: Knopf
- Yates, Richard (1975) Disturbing the Peace. New York: Seymour Lawrence / Delacorte
- Yates, Richard (1976) The Easter Parade. New York: Seymour Lawrence / Delacorte
- Yates, Richard (1978) A Good School. New York: Seymour Lawrence / Delacorte
- Yates, Richard (1981) Liars in Love (short stories). New York: Seymour Lawrence / Delacorte
- Yates, Richard (1984) Young Hearts Crying. New York: Seymour Lawrence / Delacorte
- Yates, Richard (1986) Cold Spring Harbor. New York: Seymour Lawrence / Delacorte
- Yates, Richard (unpublished) Uncertain Times, excerpted in Open City No. 3 (1995), pp. 35-71
- Yates, Richard (2001) The Collected Stories of Richard Yates. New York: Henry Holt
Notes
- Bradfield - 1992
References
- Pace, Eric (November 9, 1992) "Richard Yates, Novelist, 66, Dies; Chronicler of Disappointed Lives." New York Times
- Bradfield, Scott (November 21, 1992) "Follow the long and revolutionary road" The Independent
- O'Nan, Stewart (October/November 1999) "The Lost World of Richard Yates: How the great writer of the Age of Anxiety disappeared from print." Boston Review
- Bailey, Blake (2003) A Tragic Honesty: The Life and Work of Richard Yates. New York, New York: Picador ISBN 0312287216
- "Richard Yates (novelist)." Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. 11 Nov 2007, 20:14 UTC. Wikimedia Foundation, Inc. 13 Nov 2007 [1].
- Cobb, Mark Hughes (January 26, 2009) "Praised writer's road ended in Tuscaloosa." Tuscaloosa News
External links
- Richard Yates Archive website