Why Yates? And why now?
February 8, 2009
Bookslut.com has a wonderfully insightful feature on the incomparable Richard Yates that asks, “Why Yates? And why now?” It’s got some great background on the flawed genius behind Revolutionary Road (the film version of which is a fantastic adaptation that you really ought to see).
In 1999, the Boston Review published Stewart O’Nan’s long appreciation of Richard Yates, whose fiction had fallen out of print after his death in 1992. How, he asked, can Yates, who “represents an important aspect of the American experience: the confusion of the post-war boom,” be so neglected? A “fine writer” and gifted mortician, Yates anatomizes the desiccated corpse of “American individualism,” the hollowed-out hopes of a country and its citizens.
So began Yates’s second coming: Revolutionary Road was reissued the next year, and his other novels soon followed. In 2001, Picador released his collected stories. His fiction appeared in The New Yorker for the first time.
Read the rest over at Bookslut.com.
