A Tragic Honesty: The Life and Work of Richard Yates

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Macmillan, 2003 - Biography & Autobiography - 671 pages

Blake Bailey's A Tragic Honesty is the first biography of acclaimed American novelist and story writer Richard Yates

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.

 

Selected pages

Contents

The Caliche Road 19261939
7
A Good School 19391944
37
The Canal 19441947
75
Liars in Love 19471951
96
The Getaway 19511953
118
A Cry of Prisoners 19531959
159
A Glutton for Punishment 19591961
195
The World on Fire 19611962
238
A Special Providence 19681969
382
Fun with a Stranger 19701974
401
Disturbing the Peace 19741976
433
Out with the Old 19761978
463
Young Hearts Crying 19791984
492
No Pain Whatsoever 19851988
542
A Cheer for Realized Men 19881992
560
Epilogue
605

Uncertain Times 19621964
286
A New Yorker Discovers the Middle West 19641966
321
A Natural Girl 19661968
364
Notes
615
Index
651
Copyright

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About the author (2003)

Blake Bailey is the author of acclaimed biographies of John Cheever, Richard Yates, and Philip Roth. He has written for a number of magazines, newspapers, and scholarly publications. He lives in Waldo, Florida, with his wife Mary.