Richard Yates

Richard Yates was the child of an unhappy marriage. His parents were divorced by the time he was three. After the divorce, his mother moved to Paris to study sculpture. Yates flourished as a writer in high school, but had a difficult experience in the army, which he joined at age eighteen, during the last year of the war. Yates volunteered for a dangerous mission and permanently damaged his lungs. He did not go to college, feeling that a writer didn’t need a traditional education, a decision he would always regret. He married, had two children, moved to Paris for a period, and divorced. Yates was an alcoholic and a badly behaved drunk. After his divorce, he lived in awful squalor, spending his time drinking, sobering up, and writing. His lung troubles caused him to start every morning by vomiting, but he remained a four-pack-a-day smoker until a year before his death at sixty-six, despite once setting his apartment on fire. Yates wrote six other novels and two collections of short stories. Although his writing was always praised by other writers, he never became a true success during his lifetime and supported himself at various times by teaching writing (although he did not believe it could be taught), writing publicity materials for Remington Rand (a company similar to Knox Business Machines), and writing speeches for Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy.