Fiction Without Illusions
The Unflinching Endurance of Richard Yates
WELCOME
This space is devoted to expanding the appreciation, study, and enjoyment of one of the most piercing literary voices of the twentieth century-- and to honoring what would have been his 100th birthday.
For the Uninitiated...
Recognized early in life for his extraordinary gift with language, Richard Yates pursued the craft of fiction with a singular, almost monastic devotion. After serving in World War II, he worked in journalism, ghostwriting, and PR in New York, and even had a brief stint as speechwriter for Attorney General Robert F Kennedy, but fiction remained his true calling. His debut novel, Revolutionary Road (1961), was a finalist for the National Book Award and earned him comparisons to F. Scott Fitzgerald, John Cheever, and Gustave Flaubert.
Yates’s work exposes the quiet sadness beneath the surface of domestic life. His characters often grapple with isolation, self-deception, and the seductive myth of the American Dream. Although broader commercial success eluded him, he was revered by peers like Kurt Vonnegut, Tennessee Williams, Raymond Carver, and William Styron, to name a few.
Yates taught writing at institutions across the country and published a body of fiction marked by emotional precision and stark realism. He died in 1992 at age 66, but his reputation has grown steadily since— thanks in part to Blake Bailey’s 2003 biography A Tragic Honesty, and the 2008 film adaptation of Revolutionary Road starring Kate Winslet and Leonardo DiCaprio.
"He wasn't building anything anyone could see, but he built it anyway."
---from "Builders", the final story in the collection Eleven Kinds of Loneliness
WORKS
Move your cursor along the shelf to pull out a book and learn more.
Frank and April Wheeler are young, bright, and full of promise—but beneath the surface, the weight of routine and unspoken disappointment threatens to unravel their marriage. A devastating debut about the lies we tell ourselves and each other to survive the quiet collapse of dreams.
“A masterpiece of suburban disillusionment… as haunting and precise as a Hopper painting.”
—The New York Times
This story collection captures the melancholy of everyday life—office workers, young soldiers, teachers, and dreamers navigating the gap between who they are and who they hoped to be. Each story is a study in emotional precision, revealing the subtle ways people isolate themselves even in crowded rooms.
"Yates writes with a scalpel, not a brush. These stories cut deep." —The Boston Globe
Robert "Bobby" Prentice is a young soldier chasing romantic visions of war and heroism. Back at home, his mother Alice clings to her fading hopes of artistic greatness. In parallel, their illusions fracture in this stark portrait of ambition, failure, and generational disconnect.
“Like Breakfast at Tiffany’s spliced with All Quiet on the Western Front. Impossible to paraphrase, wonderful to read.” —Zadie Smith
One of Yates’s most harrowing and personal works. John Wilder descends into alcoholic rage, delusion, and self-destruction—despite the outward trappings of success: a family, a country home, and a career in advertising. What begins as a breakdown becomes a fevered quest for reinvention, spiraling through psychiatric wards, fleeting affairs, and a doomed Hollywood dream. A bleak meditation on identity, madness, and the fictions we cling to when reality slips away.
"Haunting, troubling, and mesmerizing, it shines a brilliant, unwavering light into the darkest recesses of a man’s psyche." —City Lights Books
The Grimes sisters follow vastly different paths in life, but an undercurrent of sadness binds them. Sarah settles early into a marriage shadowed by emotional abuse, while Emily pursues education and a career in publishing. Yates elegantly traces Emily's decades-long drift—from intellectual promise to emotional isolation, through failed relationships and family estrangement—in this masterwork of unsparing precision. One of his most universally praised novels, it captures the heartbreak and compromise of ordinary life without a trace of sentiment or disguise.
The Easter Parade is one of the most beautiful books I’ve ever read.”
—David Sedaris
Set in a second-rate Connecticut prep school during the 1940s, this ensemble novel follows William Grove and his classmates as they navigate adolescence, sexual confusion, and the looming shadow of war. Dorset Academy is a place of awkward rituals, private humiliations, and restless longing—where teachers and students alike cling to the illusion of respectability. With sardonic warmth and autobiographical candor, Yates's coming-of-age novel echoes the futility of pursuing education in a place where no one seems to know what growing up truly requires.
“The foolishness and fakery committed in the pursuit of aristocracy give a nice sardonic edge to this strangely wistful novel…” —The Atlantic Monthly
This collection of seven longer stories showcases Yates at his most intimate and incisive, tracing the emotional fault lines in relationships that erode slowly. From a Fulbright scholar adrift in postwar London to a struggling screenwriter in LA who seeks distraction in a doomed superficial romance, characters navigate fragile marriages, strained family ties, and subtle negotiations of self-worth. Yates renders their lives with a clarity that’s both tender and unfiltered,
“Esquire fiction at its bittersweetest."
—The Village Voice
Michel Davenport is a poet and aspiring painter determined to succeed on his own terms, even rejecting his heiress wife Lucy's financial support. But the pair's marriage can't endure their competing insecurities; a divorce sets off decades of emotional drift. While Lucy searches for identity and independence, Michael spirals into womanizing, artistic compromise, and breakdown. This sprawling novel—Yates's longest—offers a raw and intimate study of creative ambition and emotional sabotage, one where the studio is both sanctuary and battleground and the highball glass is never far from reach.
.“Yates intends to spare his readers nothing. He is a truthful and ruthless writer.” —The Guardian
In Yates's last published novel, two families in a weathered coastal town on Long Island become bound by the hidden weight of their own damage. Grace drinks to numb her regrets; her son Evan wanders through marriage and normalcy; his wife Rachel grasps for a sense of permanence. With his unerring eye for the forces that shape—and eat away at—ordinary life, Yates evokes family secrecy and quiet decay in a world where nothing explodes, but everything slowly fades.
“The lives portrayed are bleak, trivial, thwarted, vapid, but they are made memorable against all odds by Yates's high virtue as a writer.”
—Publishers Weekly
All titles are available from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and the library system. You’ll also find them—availability permitting—on Bookshop.org, ThriftBooks, Better World Books, AbeBooks, IndieBound, and beyond.
