Name: A Tragic Honesty
ISBN: 9780312423759

Blake Bailey

An incisive portrait of celebrated American novelist and short short writer Richard Yates describes his turbulent personal life, his struggle with alcoholism and manic depression, his financial woes, and his remarkable literary works--including The Easter Parade and Revolutionary Road--chronicling the desperation of the American middle class. Reprint.

The Life and Work of Richard Yates

A Tragic Honesty

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.

Melody Izard

Richard Yates has been adding to my reading list. While learning that he was a troubled soul, I also learned his favorite unknown writers and have been tracking down some of the out-of-print books to add to my reading list. 

My, my. What a smashed up man. I could just see him tumbling out of The Crossroads making his way to his cluttered little apartment. Flying down south in his oxygen charged smoking bomb of a car to the dreaded Tuscaloosa. But finding that southerners love a drunk troubled writer and they welcomed him up on the front porch with a big ol' tumbler of Rebel Yell.

A Tragic Honesty The Life and Work of Richard Yates

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