Product Description

Richard Yates was acclaimed as one of the most powerful, compassionate and accomplished writers of America's post-war generation. Whether addressing the smothered desire of suburban housewives, the white-collar despair of Manhattan office workers or the heartbreak of a single mother with artistic pretensions, Yates ruthlessly examines the hopes and disappointments of ordinary people with empathy and humour.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #31008 in Books
• Published on: 2009-02-27
• Original language: English
• Binding: Hardcover
• 661 pages

Review
"The Great Gatsby of my time...one of the best books by a member of my generation." --Kurt Vonnegut
"Beautifully crafted...a remarkable and deeply troubling book." --Michiko Kakutani, "The New York Times"

About the Author
Richard Yates was born in 1926 in New York and lived in California. His prize-winning stories began to appear in 1953 and his first novel, Revolutionary Road, was nominated for the National Book Award in 1961. He is the author of eight other works, including the novels A Good School, The Easter Parade, and Disturbing the Peace, and two collections of short stories, Eleven Kinds of Loneliness and Liars in Love. He died in 1992.

Customer Reviews

A classic worth having in hardback
This is such a lovely edition. The book is hardback, cloth-sewn and has gorgeous paper. Reading it is such a pleasure. You also get three novels instead of one!

Everyman's Yates
Everyman's Library books rarely disappoint and this collection of Richard Yates is no different. Yates is a neglected genius and his "Revolutionary Road", now brought to wider audience through the recent film, is a masterpiece showing the disillusionment with the American Dream that Scott Fitzgerald had also dealt with three decades earlier. "Easter Parade" is also a superb, if somewhat melancholic read, with characterisations that many contemporary authors would love to emulate. Finally, his short story collection, "Eleven Kinds of Loneliness" is very mixed in format and subject matter, but is uniformly very well written. The only downside, and what stopped this review achieving five stars, was the very short and somewhat superficial introduction. Everyman's Library books usually have an excellent literary essay as an introduction. What we have here are personal reminiscences of Yates the man, and even these are sketchy.

Otherwise an excellent buy.

Richard Yates's Fiction
Richard Yates's fiction has been out of print for a number of years, and perhaps the recent reissue of several works is due to the 2009 film version of his best-known novel 'Revolutionary Road', with di Caprio and Winslet playing Yates's dysfunctional couple the Wheelers. It's a novel about pretence in marriage - about deception and self-deception equally.
This new Everyman volume provides the best possible introduction to Yates. It's also extremely good value, as you get 'Revolutionary Road' plus an arguably even finer full-length novel 'The Easter Parade', which is again about the unhappy lives of people who live what used to be called "Madison Avenue" lifestyles. In addition, there's Yates's best-known collection of short fiction, 'Eleven Kinds of Loneliness' - spare, compelling stories, whose background settings range from Yates's native New York to expatriate Paris.
Yates was a great stylist, and his work deserves to be discovered all over again by a new generation of readers. It's good to have three of his best works in this handsome hardback publication.