Richard Yates, In Memoriam

We lost a very good friend, Richard Yates, on November 7, 1992. He died of emphysema and of complications from minor surgery in a Birmingham, Alabama, veterans hospital. Though largely unknown to the public in recent years, Dick Yates's reputation among writers was nonpareil. Robert Stone called Yates one of the best writers in the country, his work important to anyone concerned with writing, and Kurt Vonnegut hailed Yates's first novel, the classic
Revolutionary Road, published in 1961, as
The Great Gatsby of my time.

The novel chronicled the marriage of a young couple, Frank and April Wheeler, in Stamford, Connecticut, and when it was reissued by Delta-Seymour Lawrence in 1983,
The New York Times's Michiko Kakutani wrote, It remains a remarkable and deeply troubling book -- a book that creates an indelible portrait of lost promises and mortgaged hopes in the suburbs of America. His eight following books, particularly the short-story collection
Eleven Kinds of Loneliness and the novels
The Easter Parade and
A Special Providence, lived up to the promise of
Revolutionary Road, and Yates influenced an entire generation of writers, including Executive Director DeWitt Henry and Advisory Editor Andre Dubus, who had met him at the Iowa Writers' Workshop.

Yates was born in 1926 in Yonkers, New York, and raised in Manhattan, Scarsdale, and Cold Spring Harbor, Long Island. He graduated from Avon Old Farms School in Connecticut and served in the infantry in World War II. He worked as a publicity writer for Remington Rand and as a speechwriter for Robert F. Kennedy. He also taught occasionally -- at Iowa, Boston University, Emerson College, the University of Southern California, and the University of Alabama. At the time of his death, he was working on a novel,
Uncertain Times, which was to take place in Washington, D.C., during the Kennedy administration.

We will always remember Dick Yates as a writer's writer, as Robert Stone said. For many years, he lived in Boston in a small apartment on Beacon Street. The apartment was kept tidy and Spartan: he had two tables he used as desks, a typewriter, a radio tuned to classical music stations, and a television set on the floor that he never plugged in. Without fail, he wrote every day, breaking only for meals at a restaurant called Crossroads, dressed in a suit and tie. One time, he was found at Crossroads, jotting something down on a napkin. When pressed, he bashfully revealed that he was listing the titles of his books on the napkin (three of which --
Revolutionary Road, Eleven Kinds of Loneliness, and
The Easter Parade -- are still kept in print by Vintage Contemporaries). Nine books, Yates, who knew he was in ill health, said. Nine's not bad, is it? No, Dick, not bad at all. Goodbye, good friend. We will miss you.