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A Tragic Honesty: The Life and Work of Richard Yates
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Product Description
Celebrated in his prime, forgotten in his final years, only to be championed anew by our greatest contemporary authors, Richard Yates has always exposed readers to the unsettling hypocrisies of our modern age. Classic novels such as Revolutionary Road and The Easter Parade are incomparable chronicles of the quiet and not-so-quiet desperation of the American middle-class. Lonely housewives, addled businessmen, desperate career-girls and fearful boys and soldiers, Yates’s America was a panorama of high living, self-doubt and self-deception. And in the tradition of other great realistic writers of his time (Fitzgerald and Hemingway, Cheever and Updike), Yates’s fictional world mirrored his own. A manic-depressive alcoholic and unapologetic gentleman, his life was a hornets’ nest of childhood ghosts, the horrors of war, money woes, and ebullient cocktailed evenings in New York, Hollywood, and the Riviera.
A Tragic Honesty is a masterful evocation of a man who in many ways embodied the struggles of the Great American Writer in the latter half of the twentieth century. Fame and reward followed by heartbreak and obscurity, Richard Yates here stands for what the writer must sacrifice for his craft, the devil’s bargain of artistry for happiness, praise for sanity.
Product Details
- Amazon Sales Rank: #832561 in Books
- Published on: 2003-07-01
- Original language: English
- Binding: Hardcover
- 656 pages
Editorial Reviews
From Amazon.com
Richard Yates worked his way down from the top. His brilliantly pitiless 1961 classic about exploded '50s suburban dreams, Revolutionary Road, made him a peer of Cheever and Updike (though Natalie Wood broke his heart by scuttling the movie version). William Styron got him a gig writing civil rights speeches for Bobby Kennedy: "He used RFK s a ventriloquist's dummy," says Kurt Vonnegut, who, like Yates's future employer, David (NYPD Blue) Milch, met him at the celebrated Iowa writing program. Yates's dark gift casts a colossal shadow enriching our culture: he was a profound influence on Richard Ford, Mary Robison, Ann Beattie, and the Minimalist literary movement. He also inspired the "Alton Benes" Seinfeld episode (his daughter, who apparently shares her dad's mordant wit, helped inspire the character Elaine). Blake Bailey soberly records Yates's rather stylishly bleak spiral from fame into drunkenness and self-imposed obscurity, despite the loyalty of his famous friends. He drunkenly set fire to his beard, succumbed to writer's block and delusions that he'd killed JFK, heedlessly and needlessly alienated even people he admired. But one reason he died poor, with the manuscript of his RFK novel, Uncertain Times in his freezer, was precisely his gift: an honesty that ranks with the greatest of tragedians. --Tim Appelo
From Publishers Weekly
Richard Yates's most famous novel, Revolutionary Road, set the tone for most of his later fiction: it was, for biographer Bailey, a thinly veiled depiction of Yates (1926-1992) and his immediate surroundings, in many cases with the names barely changed, and was widely praised at the time of its release only to fade into semi-obscurity except for a small group of devotees. Bailey's (The Sixties) massive biography strip-mines Yates's fiction for details of his life; on more than one occasion, the abundance of story elements with real-life parallels is used to suggest that another element, such as the protagonist's affair with a prostitute in the short story "Liars in Love," might also have some basis in fact. These conjectures are offset by extensive interviews with surviving family and acquaintances. At times the sheer amount of information can be overwhelming, in part because the reader is subject to an unrelenting depiction of Yates's life as "a parody of the self-destructive personality." He smoked heavily for decades despite tuberculosis, emphysema and pneumonia, and was often barely able to breathe, and eyewitnesses recall numerous provocative outbursts and emotional breakdowns brought on by the potent combination of manic-depression and alcoholism. And there's the repeated heartache of an author pushing himself time and time again to complete a book, never quite obtaining the success he so desperately wants. Apart from a tendency to throw in disruptive foreshadowing asides, Bailey has done a great job of sorting through the facts of Yates's difficult life, assembling them into a story that mirrors the best of his subject's fiction.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Booklist
*Starred Review* When the great American novelist and short story writer Richard Yates, best remembered for his 1961 masterpiece, Revolutionary Road, died in 1992, a colleague found his last manuscript stashed in the freezer, a relatively safe location given that in the mid-1970s Yates, who lived a threadbare, even grim, existence, nearly lost the manuscript for A Good School when he started a fire in another of his dreary apartments. And so it went for Yates, a four-pack-a-day smoker in spite of bouts with tuberculosis, an alcoholic with severe bipolar disorder, and a brilliant writer of rigorous integrity who always lived in extremis. Bailey, a skilled and empathic biographer, is the first to comprehensively chronicle Yates' difficult life, and he writes with just the sort of clean, precise, and powerful prose his subject devoted himself to, insightfully discussing Yates' spectacularly unhappy Greenwich Village childhood and his struggles to write while teaching and working as a business writer, Hollywood screenwriter, and speechwriter for Robert Kennedy. As Bailey meticulously and perceptively chronicles Yates' arduous translation of experience into art, he exposes the anguish and transcendence of the writing life and the tragedy of mental illness. Donna Seaman
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