Richard Yates | Biography

Richard Yates has enjoyed the strong personal advocacy of critics and fellow writers, among them John Ciardi, William Styron, Tennessee Williams, Dorothy Parker, Vance Bourjaily, and Kurt Vonnegut, who called his first novel, Revolutionary Road (1961), "The Great Gatsby of my time." From his first stories to his most recent novels, Yates's work is characterized by a profound sadness; his themes of disappointment and disillusion are expressed in the lives of closely familiar characters, such that the average reader would find it difficult to distance himself from the action, and, as a result, large popular audiences have shied away from this sensitive author.

Richard Yates was born on 3 February 1926 in Yonkers, New York. His father was a sales executive, as are John Wilder in Disturbing the Peace (1975) and Frank Wheeler's father in Revolutionary Road, and Yates's early years were spent moving from home to home in and around New York, much like his protagonist, Emily Grimes, in The Easter Parade (1976). He graduated from Avon School in 1944 and served as an infantry private in World War II, collecting experiences similar to those of his characters in A Special Providence (1969). Following the war he worked as a rewrite man for United Press (Emily's father in The Easter Parade is a headline writer), as a publicity writer for Remington Rand (in Revolutionary Road Frank Wheeler does the same work for "Knox Business Machines, Inc."), and then (following two years off in Europe writing fiction, something Frank Wheeler hoped to do, as well) as a freelance ghostwriter until 1959, when a series of university teaching positions at Columbia, Iowa, and the New School for Social Research helped him build an academic reputation.

In terms of prizes and recognition, Yates is a well-endowed author. Revolutionary Road was nominated for the National Book Award in fiction, a rare honor for a first novel, and one year later Yates won a Guggenheim Fellowship. His stories have appeared in several prize collections, and the National Institute of Arts and Letters has honored him twice, in 1963 and in 1975. Brandeis University and the National Arts Council made substantial awards, and all of his books have benefited from strong, supportive reviews.

Each of his books speaks to a special kind of sadness, even from its title or first sentence. From "The final dying sounds" which begin Revolutionary Road, to the Eleven Kinds of Loneliness enumerated in his short story collection of 1962, the disappointing trips "On Saturday" in A Special Providence, the fact that "Everything began to go wrong for Janice Wilder in the late summer of 1960" recounted in Disturbing the Peace, and the foreboding opening phrase of The Easter Parade ("Neither of the Grimes sisters would have a happy life"), Richard Yates presents a picture of unrelieved sadness, redeemed only by his excellent literary style.

Yates's achievement has been to take characters so average that they tend to be flat and uninteresting and--by his management of imagery and style--capture the truth of their lives, all in a manner which makes the writing itself interesting and optimistic to read, at the same time that the materials described are not. His first novel, a study of the empty fates hopelessly challenged by Frank and April Wheeler, succeeds as a series of slight hopes followed by crushing disappointments. Frank feels superior to his office job, while April feels she is a great actress. Both pride themselves on their deeper spirits, but neither can rise above plain selfishness. "Every phrase reflects the highest degree of integrity and stylistic mastery," said Jeremy Larner. He continued, "To read Revolutionary Road is to have forced upon one a fresh sense of our crucial modern shortcomings: failures of work, education, community, family, marriage ... and plain nerve." "Yates can take a threadbare suburban cliche," David Boroff wrote, "and endow it with stinging new life." When Eleven Kinds of Loneliness appeared the next year, some critics were disappointed by the unrelieved sadness of its theme, and especially by its narrowness of application over eleven different situations. But Hollis Alpert, who voiced some of the strongest complaints, also admitted that, "Mr. Yates depends on our recognizing his characters, and many of his stories gain strength not because they are unique, but because he has thrown a searchlight on the lives of more or less anonymous ones."

By 1969, when A Special Providence appeared, critics recognized that Yates was resisting the urge toward innovation (as represented by John Barth, Thomas Pynchon, Kurt Vonnegut, and others) and maintaining instead "a leisurely and direct manner, more in the tradition of Bennett than of Barth," as Robert Phillips said. "And in a time of hysterical experimentation in the novel," he concluded, "his is a triumph of lucidity--utterly lacking in stylistic gymnastics or self-conscious mannerism. Which is not to say that Yates's technique is artless. Within the limits of quotidian detail he is especially skillful at devising symbolic acts that reverberate with meaning." A Special Providence is set in World War II, to which the protagonist feels superior. But his prejudice and aloofness make him lonely, all the more sad because his alienation derives from his very sense of worth. Richard Todd summed up how moderate the criticism of Yates has been when he said of Disturbing the Peace, "Every page, flawed or not, bears the mark of comprehended pain.... Disturbing the Peace reminds you of the considerable courage that can sometimes be found in unselfconscious art." This novel portrays the disillusion and ultimately the breakdown of John Wilder, a successful salesman who identifies his own higher aspirations with those of the Kennedy years. But once more, Yates shows how a character's will to do better makes him do worse--human aspirations are not to be trusted. The Easter Parade is based on even slimmer hopes--of two sisters, Sarah and Emily Grimes, one of whom gets her picture in the newspaper as a young, attractive girl. The rest of their lives decline from this one happy memory--so viciously that Emily resents the happiness of others. Only sadness is within her reach.

While Yates is not an innovationist in the sense of Barth, Pynchon, or Vonnegut, neither is he a social realist in the tradition of John Steinbeck or John O'Hara. His sense of literary style moves him closer to John Updike, but without Updike's brilliantly sensitive characters. Instead, Yates writes of people who aren't witty, attractive, charming, or deep--just unexceptional people, whose lives have no hold on us beyond the fact that they are so recognizable. They occupy a small universe; and by strictly limiting himself to the microcosm of their lives, Yates manages to present them in a fullness which compels our interest. Most importantly, he styles his writing so the reader must face the kind of sadness he describes. A rich comparison can be made between Yates's work and Joseph Heller's achievement in Something Happened (1974), which showed the same ability to take the conventional suburban life of a New York City advertising man and, by the rigors of literary style, capture the very essence of married middle-class life in comfortable America. It may be an important measure of Yates's significance in the developing tradition of contemporary American fiction that Joseph Heller, an acknowledged innovator with Catch-22 in 1961 (the same year as Revolutionary Road), adopted Yates's method for his second novel thirteen years later.