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product details and reviews (5.36 seconds for ASIN 0312287216)
A Tragic Honesty: The Life and Work of Richard Yates![]() Author: Blake BaileyPublisher: PicadorMedia: HardcoverRelated ProductsView some of the @count@ related items available from eBay. Related Items Available from eBayProduct DescriptionThe first biography of acclaimed American novelist and story writer Richard Yates Celebrated in his prime, forgotten in his final years, only to be championed anew by our greatest contemporary authors, Richard Yates has always exposed readers to the unsettling hypocrisies of our modern age. Classic novels such as Revolutionary Road and The Easter Parade are incomparable chronicles of the quiet and not-so-quiet desperation of the American middle-class. Lonely housewives, addled businessmen, desperate career-girls and fearful boys and soldiers, Yates’s America was a panorama of high living, self-doubt and self-deception. And in the tradition of other great realistic writers of his time (Fitzgerald and Hemingway, Cheever and Updike), Yates’s fictional world mirrored his own. A manic-depressive alcoholic and unapologetic gentleman, his life was a hornets’ nest of childhood ghosts, the horrors of war, money woes, and ebullient cocktailed evenings in New York, Hollywood, and the Riviera. A Tragic Honesty is a masterful evocation of a man who in many ways embodied the struggles of the Great American Writer in the latter half of the twentieth century. Fame and reward followed by heartbreak and obscurity, Richard Yates here stands for what the writer must sacrifice for his craft, the devil’s bargain of artistry for happiness, praise for sanity. Average Rating: 4.5 Product ReviewsSuccess and Failure are Both Difficult to Endure Bailey has a great style that was also evident in his biography of John Cheever. His research is thorough and takes details of Yates' life and makes direct relationships to passages from his work. As a biographer, Bailey is appropriately detached from his subjects for objectivity but it is evident that both Yates and Cheever are individuals he respects and ensure that they receive fair and balanced treatment.
Hard Subject Well written and thought out (the author showed much humor and compassion) - that said, Yates was someone whom you want to read, but I wish I did not learn so much about him. The sheer repetitiveness of his misfortune regarding his own "human condition" does not make for anything really illuminating about a typical non-recovering alcoholic "Genius".
Excellent Literary Bio of a overrated sexist creep! This bio pulls no punches,this a excellent,gripping, read,but I will reread this again in a few years.This man is absolute turd as female myself I am amazed how women throw themselves at man just because a man is an artist of somekind and how people just willing to make excuses for him just because he's a writer.I have to admit he seems to very dedicated to his daughters,but he also but unreasonable demands on them and other women as well I almost couldn't almost go through with the book. The shallow,backward,sexist way he wiewed women and something and or someone was always at fault why the women in life always ( for good reason) left him ,in his misguided vision it's never his.Mr Yates seems never want to leave the fifties.It never occurred to him there are a lot of women writers that surpassed him in importance.The point is he's an important writer and this is an engrossing read and the sad subject will leave you gripped, as much I disliked Richard Yates personality,I have to hand to Blake Bailey he should get somekind of literary award he knows his subject. This excellent literary biography is worth spending time with a selfish,sexist, lunatic subect! Yatesian to the end Richard Yates is stranger than fiction, which makes for fascinating reading. The amount of misery he himself endured, and the pain he inflicted on those around him are incomprehensible. Richard Yates's mental and physical comebacks are the amazing part of his life story. And the remarkable disconnects--his books are about self-deception, but their insights seemed to have eluded him in life. Excellent Biography After reading Revolutionary Road , I was interested in the life of Richard Yates. Blake Bailey's biography was an in depth, well written account of Yates's life while still being extremly readable. I found myself unable to put the book down at times. Although it is very detailed and fact filled , instead of being dry, it read like a novel. I would highly recommend this book and look forward to reading Bailey's biography of Cheever. I am hooked. |
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