Richard Yates
Richard Yates was an American novelist and short-story writer born on February 3, 1926, in Yonkers, New York. He served in the U.S. Army during the final years of World War II before embarking on a writing career that began in earnest with the publication of his acclaimed novel, *Revolutionary Road*, in 1961. This debut received critical praise and was nominated for a National Book Award, propelling Yates into the literary spotlight. Despite this promising start, Yates struggled to replicate his early success over the next twenty-five years, facing challenges in both his personal life, including battles with alcoholism and mental illness, and his professional endeavors. He worked various jobs, including as a speechwriter for Robert Kennedy and a screenwriter in Hollywood, while also teaching at the University of Iowa's prestigious Writers' Workshop. Yates's literary contributions often explored themes of sadness and disillusionment, portraying the lives of average Americans with depth and intensity. His work gained posthumous recognition, particularly with the release of *The Collected Stories of Richard Yates* in 2001, which confirmed his status as a significant figure in American literature. Throughout his career, Yates earned respect from peers, with comparisons drawn to greats like F. Scott Fitzgerald and John Updike.
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Richard Yates
- Born: February 3, 1926
- Birthplace: New York, New York
- Died: November 7, 1992
- Place of death: Birmingham, Alabama
Biography
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.