A Tragic Honesty: The Life and Work of Richard Yates - Softcover

Bailey, Blake

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0312423756 ISBN 13: 9780312423759

Publisher: Picador, 2004

Synopsis

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.

About this title

About the Author

Blake Bailey is the author of The Sixties and has written for a number of magazines, newspapers, and literary journals. He lives in northern Florida with his wife, Mary Brinkmeyer.

Reviews

In addition to writing the 1961 classic "Revolutionary Road," three or four more very good novels, and some wonderful short stories, Richard Yates led a life faithful to a certain cliché of the twentieth-century American male writer: wrecked marriages, raging alcoholism, mental breakdowns, biting poverty, and an uncompromising vision of art. Along the way, he made brief stops in Washington, as R.F.K.'s speechwriter (the one man there just for the money, he thought), and Hollywood (screenwriting for the money, like everyone else, but failing to make much). That was about enough compromising for Yates, who for years didn't let emphysema, or its attendant oxygen tanks, stop him from smoking four packs of cigarettes a day. Bailey has difficulty imagining Yates as anything other than a Yates character, but his portrait has little of the texture that made those characters come alive.
Copyright © 2005 The New Yorker

Edition details

• Publisher: Picador
• Publication date: 2004
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0312423756
• ISBN 13: 9780312423759
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 688