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 stayed in his Tuscaloosa apartment to finish a novel based on his experiences in the Kennedy administration. A chain smoker who suffered from severe emphysema, Yates died 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.
• Yates, Richard (1969) A Special Providence
• Yates, Richard (1975) Disturbing the Peace
• Yates, Richard (1976) The Easter Parade
• Yates, Richard (1978) A Good School
• Yates, Richard (1981) Liars in Love
• Yates, Richard (1984) Young Hearts Crying
• Yates, Richard (1986) Cold Spring Harbor

References

• Pace, Eric (November 9, 1992) "Richard Yates, Novelist, 66, Dies; Chronicler of Disappointed Lives." New York Times.
• 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.
• "Richard Yates (novelist)." Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. 11 Nov 2007, 20:14 UTC. Wikimedia Foundation, Inc. 13 Nov 2007 [1].