Richard Yates has enjoyed the strong personal advocacy of critics and fellow writers, among them John Ciardi, William Styron, Tennessee Williams, Dorothy Parker, Vance Bourjaily, and Kurt Vonnegut, who called his first novel, Revolutionary Road (1961), "The Great Gatsby of my time." From his first stories to his most recent novels, Yates's work is characterized by a profound sadness; his themes of disappointment and disillusion are expressed in the lives of closely familiar characters, such that the average reader would find it difficult to distance himself from the action, and, as a result, large popular audiences have shied away from this sensitive author.

Richard Yates was born on 3 February 1926 in Yonkers, New York. His father was a sales executive, as are John Wilder in Disturbing the Peace (1975) and Frank Wheeler's father in Revolutionary Road, and Yates's early years were spent moving from home to home in and around New...