A Tragic Honesty (Magill’s Literary Annual 2004)
At a glance:
- Author: Blake Bailey
- First Published: 2003
- Type of Work: Literary biography
- Time of Work: 1926-1992
- Setting: Westchester, New York; Greenwich Village, New York; Paris; and Iowa
- Principal Characters: Richard Yates, Sheila Bryant, Martha Speer, Gina Yates, Ruth Yates, Vincent Yates, Grace Schulman, Jerry Schulman, R. V. Cassill, William Styron, George Garrett, John Frankenheimer, Robert Kennedy
- Genres: Nonfiction, Biography
- Subjects: New York, Parents and children, France or French people, Twentieth century, Authors or writers, New York City, Literature, Education or educators, Paris, Alcoholism or alcoholics, Mental illness, Substance abuse, Novelists, Alcohol, Drinking or drunkenness, Paranoia, Iowa
- Locales: Greenwich Village, New York, Paris, France, Iowa
Blake Bailey does not spare the reader Richard Yates’s agonies—his lifelong alcoholism, psychotic episodes, failed marriages, and doubts about the value of his writing—any more than Yates spared his characters their indignities. April and Frank Wheeler, the principal figures in his greatest novel, Revolutionary Road (1961), begin their marriage in a 1950’s Connecticut suburb—terrain familiar to readers of John Updike and John Cheever, to whom Yates has often been compared—with a sense of superiority, a dream of greatness that they manifestly will not be able to...
[The entire page is 1700 words long]
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