Richard Yates (1926-1992)
Blake Bailey’s new biography of John Cheever is receiving near-unanimous praise. (My copy arrived in the mail today from Amazon, but I’m determined to read Denis Johnson’s 2007 National Book Award-winning novel Tree of Smoke first.) Worth recalling for a moment is Bailey’s magnificent 2003 biography of Richard Yates, A Tragic Honesty. Yates yearned but never got to see any of his short stories published in the New Yorker. Cheever, of course, along with John Updike*, was a New Yorker mainstay for decades. Even the great Yates novel, Revolutionary Road, was a hard luck case: nominated for the National Book Award in 1961, it lost—along with Catch-22—to Walker Percy’s The Moviegoer. Yates believed his career was forever derailed by the loss. Asked once by a student if he really wanted the award, Yates replied: “Want it? Want it? Of course I wanted it. I wanted it so fucking bad I could taste it!”
*Updike, in what was apparently the final book review he wrote before his death, dissed the new Cheever bio as “a heavy, dispiriting read.”
Coffee Spew 
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