He held her with what seemed all his strength, feeling her tremble, and said against her hair that he’d be very, very glad to have it.
“Oh, Jesus, I hope it’ll fit,” she said. “Wear it—wear it in health, okay?”
And she was hurrying back up toward the door, where she turned to wave, using her free hand to wipe quickly at one and then the other of her eyes.
He stood watching until after she’d gone inside, and until the tall windows of one room after another cast their sudden light into the darkness. Then more lights came on and more, room upon room, as Sally ventured deeper into the house she had always loved and probably always would—having it now, for the first time and at least for a little while, all to herself.
BY RICHARD YATES
Revolutionary Road (1961)
Eleven Kinds of Loneliness (1962)
A Special Providence (1969)
Disturbing the Peace (1975)
The Easter Parade (1976)
A Good School (1978)
Liars in Love (1981)
Young Hearts Crying (1984)
Cold Spring Harbor (1986)
The Collected Stories of Richard Yates (2001)
Additional Acclaim for The Collected Stories of Richard Yates
“A superb collection … a laureate of romantic loneliness.”
—Anthony Quinn, The New York Times Book Review
“Was there ever a writer who saw so clearly and depicted so faithfully the cracks in this broken world? Reading through the stories again, I was left as devastated as ever.… I hope that this long-overdue collection will do for Richard Yates what that big red book did for Cheever twenty years ago—surprise us with the irrefutable proof of his genius and leave us feeling a little ashamed, perhaps, of being so taken by surprise.”
—Michael Chabon
“One soars on the updrafts of his brilliance to a special kind of literary high.”
—San Diego Union-Tribune
“[An] extraordinary collection … His style is old-fashioned and courteous without being formal, and his people emerge by what they say to one another.”
—Gail Caldwell, The Boston Globe
“One of America’s best-kept secrets … These stories are so powerful, emotionally honest and crisp … Keenly insightful, brutally honest … delivering a swift kick to the heart.”
—The Denver Post
“Evoking entire worlds in a few words … [An] A.”
—Entertainment Weekly
“Unflinchingly honest and shuddering in impact.”
—Philadelphia Inquirer
“Like Chekhov or William Maxwell, Richard Yates sees deep into the knotty hearts of his people, a rare talent that keeps his work fresh and essential.… By uniting his award-winning stories with fine unpublished ones … The Collected Stories reminds us how dangerous a writer Richard Yates is. No one should know this much about us.”
—Stewart O’Nan
“Yates is a virtuoso craftsman, and his mature style is enviable.… [He] knew how to rivet the reader’s attention on the quiet desperation of unacknowledged lives.”
—Lee Siegel, Harper’s Magazine
“Whereas O’Hara’s fulminations against status-seeking and Kerouac’s rogue posturing are showing their age, Yates’s writing retains the power to disturb us. There is a timeless honesty to his work.… Richard Yates remains a dangerous and devastating writer.”
—Stephen Amidon, The Atlantic Monthly
“Legendary … Yates writes … better than any other American about the decade that followed World War II.”
—Bart Schneider, Minneapolis Star Tribune
“To me and to many other writers of my generation, the work of Richard Yates came as a liberating force. With its clarity and immediacy, it seemed to set contemporary fiction free from self-consciousness and solipsism.… He was one of the most important and influential writers of the second half of the century.”
—Robert Stone
About the Author
RICHARD YATES was born on February 3, 1926, in Yonkers, New York. His parents divorced when he was two, and he grew up with his mother, a frustrated sculptor, and his older sister, Ruth.
Yates was a scholarship student at Avon Old Farms School. Upon graduation he served in the infantry in Europe during the last months of World War II. Soon after discharge he was diagnosed with tuberculosis, and spent a year and a half in a VA sanatorium. After leaving the hospital, he and his first wife, Sheila, moved to the south of France. While they were there, Yates’s work came to the attention of Seymour Lawrence, then an editor at The Atlantic Monthly, who published “Jody Rolled the Bones” as an Atlantic First.
When he returned to the United States in 1953, Yates wrote freelance ad copy for Remington Rand and worked on Revolutionary Road. During this time, he drank heavily and had his first mental breakdown, beginning a lifelong battle with alcoholism and manic depression. He was divorced in 1959. The astonishing critical success of Revolutionary Road in 1961 led to a post as speechwriter for Attorney General Robert Kennedy, which was cut short by his brother John’s assassination in 1963. Yates then moved to Hollywood and wrote many screenplays, including an adaptation of William Styron’s Lie Down in Darkness for director John Frankenheimer, though none was ever produced.
Yates spent seven years teaching at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where he met his second wife, Martha, and struggled to complete A Special Providence. After Iowa denied him tenure, Yates taught at several universities around the Midwest and finally relocated to New York City and wrote Disturbing the Peace as his second marriage disintegrated. Seymour Lawrence, now a book publisher with his own imprint, offered Yates a contract, and would publish him for the remainder of his career. Yates spent the next eight years in Boston, a productive period that saw publication of his last four books.
A second stint in Hollywood was followed by a Visiting Writer position at the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa in 1991. When his teaching duties were completed, however, Yates was in too poor health to leave Tuscaloosa. A lifetime of smoking four packs of cigarettes a day had resulted in emphysema. Despite his flagging powers of concentration, he worked every day on a novel about his Kennedy speechwriting experiences entitled Uncertain Times. He was unable to finish it. He died on November 7, 1992, at the VA hospital in Birmingham, Alabama, of complications following hernia surgery.
LIARS IN LOVE. Copyright © 2001 by Richard Yates.
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Richard Yates, Liars in Love
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