Richard Yates Books In Order

Revolutionary Road

‘A deft, ironic, beautiful novel that deserves to be a classic.’ William StyronFrom the moment of its publication in 1961, Revolutionary Road was hailed as a masterpiece of realistic fiction and as the most evocative portrayal of the opulent desolation of the American suburbs. It’s the story of Frank and April Wheeler, a bright, beautiful, and talented couple who have lived on the assumption that greatness is only just around the corner. With heartbreaking compassion and remorseless clarity, Richard Yates shows how Frank and April mortgage their spiritual birthright, betraying not only each other, but their best selves. In his introduction to this edition, novelist Richard Ford pays homage to the lasting influence and enduring power of Revolutionary Road. From the Trade Paperback edition.

A Special Providence

Robert Prentice has spent all his life attempting to escape his mother’s stifling presence. His mother, Alice, for her part, struggles with her own demons as she attempts to realize her dreams of prosperity and success as a sculptor.

As Robert goes off to fight in Europe, hoping to become his own man, Richard Yates portrays a soldier in the depths of war striving to live up to his heroic ideals. With haunting clarity, Yates crafts an unforgettable portrait of two people who cannot help but hope for more even as life challenges them both.

Disturbing the Peace

Hailed as America’s finest realistic novelist by the Boston Globe, Richard Yates, author of Revolutionary Road, garnered rare critical acclaim for his bracing, unsentimental portraits of middle class American life. Disturbing the Peace is no exception. Haunting, troubling, and mesmerizing, it shines a brilliant, unwavering light into the darkest recesses of a man s psyche.

To all appearances, John Wilder has all the trappings of success, circa 1960: a promising career in advertising, a loving family, a beautiful apartment, even a country home. John s evenings are spent with associates at quiet Manhattan lounges and his weekends with friends at glittering cocktail parties. But something deep within this seemingly perfect life has long since gone wrong. Something has disturbed John s fragile peace, and he can no longer find solace in fleeting affairs or alcohol. The anger, the drinking, and the recklessness are building to a crescendo and they re about to take down John s career and his family. What happens next will send John on a long, strange journey at once tragic and inevitable.

The Easter Parade

In The Easter Parade, first published in 1976, we meet sisters Sarah and Emily Grimes when they are still the children of divorced parents. We observe the sisters over four decades, watching them grow into two very different women. Sarah is stable and stalwart, settling into an unhappy marriage. Emily is precocious and independent, struggling with one unsatisfactory love affair after another. Richard Yates’s classic novel is about how both women struggle to overcome their tarnished family’s past, and how both finally reach for some semblance of renewal.

A Good School

Richard Yates, who died in 1992, is today ranked by many readers, scholars, and critics alongside such titans of modern American ficiton as Updike, Roth, Irving, Vonnegut, and Mailer. In this work, he offers a spare and autumnal novel about a New England prep school. At once a meditation on the twilight of youth and an examination of America’s entry into World War II, A Good School tells the stories of William Grove, the quiet boy who becomes an editor of the school newspaper; Jack Draper, a crippled chemistry teacher; and Edith Stone, the schoolmaster’s young daughter, who falls in love with most celebrated boy in the class of 1943.

Young Hearts Crying

In Young Hearts Crying, Yates movingly portrays a man and a woman from their courtship and marriage in the 1950s to their divorce in the 70s, chronicling their heartbreaking attempts to reach their highest ambitions. Michael Davenport dreams of being a poet after returning home from World War II Europe, and at first he and his new wife Lucy enjoy their life together. But as the decades pass and the success of others creates an oppressive fear of failure in both Michael and Lucy, their once bright future gives way to a life of adultery and isolation. With empathy and grace, Yates creates a poignant novel of the desires and disasters of a tragic, hopeful couple.

Cold Spring Harbor

In this classic novel Richard Yates, hailed as a preeminent chronicler of the American condition and author of the acclaimed Revolutionary Road, weaves a masterful, unflinching tale of two families brought together by chance, desperation, and desire. Evan Shepard was born with good looks, bad luck, and a love for the open ro But it was on one such drive, with his father from rural Long Island into lower Manhattan, that Evan’s life would be changed forever. When their car breaks down on a Greenwich Village street, Evan s father presses a random doorbell, looking for a telephone. Within hours, two families sharing equally complex and addled histories will come together. There will be flirtation. There will be a marriage. There will be a child, a new home But as Evan moves further into the uncharted land of manhood, as the women and men around him come into focus, he faces roads not taken and a journey not made in Richard Yates haunting exploration of human restlessness, family secrets, and a future shaped by them both.

American Contemporaries

This collection of beautiful, enduring hardcover editions features modern American masterpieces, including works by Nobel Prize and National Book Award winners. With elegant cloth sewn bindings, gold stamped covers, and silk ribbon markers, these classics are an essential for any home library. Titles included:Beloved by Toni MorrisonThe Border Trilogy by Cormac McCarthyRabbit Angstrom by John UpdikeRevolutionary Road; The Easter Parade; Eleven Kinds of Loneliness by Richard YatesWe Tell Ourselves Stories in Order to Live by Joan Didion

Eleven Kinds of Loneliness

First published in 1962, a year after Revolutionary Road, this sublime collection of stories seems even more powerful today. Out of the lives of Manhattan office workers, a cab driver seeking immortality, frustrated would be novelists, suburban men and their yearning, neglected women, Richard Yates creates a haunting mosaic of the 1950s, the era when the American dream was finally coming true and just beginning to ring a little hollow.

The Collected Stories of Richard Yates

A literary event of the highest order, The Collected Stories of Richard Yates brings together Yates’s peerless short fiction in a single volume for the first time. Richard Yates was acclaimed as one of the most powerful, compassionate, and technically accomplished writers of America’s postwar generation, and his work has inspired such diverse talents as Richard Ford, Ann Beattie, Andr Dubus, Robert Stone, and Kurt Vonnegut Jr. This collection, as powerful as Yate’s beloved Revolutionary Road, contains the stories of his classic works Eleven Kinds of Loneliness a book The New York Times Book Review hailed as ‘the New York equivalent of Dubliners’ and Liars in Love; it also features nine new stories, seven of which have never been published. Whether addressing the smothered desire of suburban housewives, the white collar despair of Manhattan office workers, the grim humor that atts life on a tuberculosis ward, or the moments of terrified peace experienced by American soldiers in World War II, Yates examines every frayed corner of the American dream. His stories, as empathetic as they are unforgiving, are like no others in our nation’s literature. Published with a moving introduction by the novelist Richard Russo, this collection will stand as its author’s final masterpiece.