Richard Yates (1926-1992) was one of the most spectacular literary voices our country has produced, yet most of his books were out of print when he died. Like J.F. Powers or Charles Portis, both recently resurrected in paperback, Yates’ books were prized treasures for those readers fortunate enough to find them in secondhand bookshops, much the way Albert Drake’s are now.

Now, with the publication of The Collected Stories of Richard Yates (Henry Holt, 474 p., $28) and his best novels in revival, Yates has returned, like the ghost of Hamlet’s father, to right past wrongs — in this case, to show us what’s wrong with contemporary fiction. The Collected Stories brings together Yates’ two volumes of short fiction, Eleven Kinds of Loneliness (1962) and Liars in Love (1981), along with a number of uncollected and unpublished works.

The main catalyst for the publication of these stories was an essay that novelist Stewart O’Nan wrote for the Boston Book Review in late 1999. O’Nan, one of Granta’s Best Young American Novelists and author most recently of Everyday People, has almost single-handedly brought Yates back to life and reinvigorated interest in an otherwise forgotten author. His now-famous essay, subtitled "How the great writer of the Age of Anxiety disappeared from print," followed the trajectory of Yates’ life and writing career, making a convincing plea for his return from bibliographic exile.

Since O’Nan’s essay, several other publishing houses have jumped on the bandwagon; you can (and should!) now find Yates’ masterpieces Revolutionary Road and The Easter Parade in paperback. Reading them makes it hard to believe how close we came to losing this author.

The old rock ’n’ roll cliché holds true of Yates: Only 5,000 people read any one of his books when they came out, but 4,000 of those people went on to write books of their own. Yates makes it look easy. He tells his stories without overpouring of emotion. His writing is clinical, but only insofar as the precision of his prose cuts to the heart of his characters.

"The amazing thing to me," O’Nan said recently, "is that he does it without fireworks, without those clumps of self-conscious ‘fine writing’ you see from so many post-’69 writers. He just lays the human truth out."

Glowing dust jacket quotes from our most luminous contemporary writers attest to Yates’ place in the pantheon of modern fiction. Michael Chabon, recent winner of the Pulitzer for his novel The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, asks, "Was there ever a writer who saw so clearly and depicted so faithfully the cracks in this broken world?" Robert Stone calls Yates "one of the most important and influential writers of the second half of the century." But critical success and popularity often make uncomfortable bedfellows.

Yates was born in Yonkers in 1926. He served in World War II and upon returning home was diagnosed with tuberculosis. (Many of his stories take place in a VA sick ward.) After a lengthy recuperation, he and his first wife moved to France, and his fiction soon came to the attention of The Atlantic Monthly. In 1953, he returned to the States and began work on his first novel, Revolutionary Road, writing ad copy to support himself. His first mental breakdown, brought about in part by serious drinking, led to a divorce in 1959. He would suffer from alcoholism and depression for the rest of his life.

The tremendous praise for Revolutionary Road (finally published in 1961) earned him a job as a speechwriter for Robert Kennedy, then U.S. attorney general. After JFK’s assassination in 1963, Yates went to Hollywood to write screenplays and to Iowa to teach at the famous Writers’ Workshop. There, he met his second wife, then went on to other teaching positions in the Midwest before they moved back to New York and the marriage dissolved.

Yates spent a few years in Boston, went back to Hollywood, then accepted a visiting professor position in Tuscaloosa, AL. When that job ended, he didn’t have enough money to go anywhere else and his four-packs-a-day habit caught up with him. Despite the emphysema, he continued work on a book about his days with the Kennedys until he died in November 1992 of complications arising during hernia surgery.

Many of the Collected Stories deal with issues of failure, or of not living up to full potential. The characters are sculptors and writers who, more often than not, feel a sense of entitlement; in their own minds they are exceptional people living in ordinary circumstances. Tension is always nearby, like a mine fire burning steadily for years many miles underground. So is the drinking; alcohol fuels the well-buried fires and spurts through the occasional surface fissure.

Yates understood his characters inside and out because he understood people; no American author has known himself — and the people around him — better. He knew the inner workings of the human mind, and the Collected Stories detail how these workings can affect the actions of the body.

Every lover of literature should allow the Collected Stories to introduce you to this important, singular man of letters. From there, you’ll want to move onto Revolutionary Road or The Easter Parade (1976), which many consider his best novel.

There’s nothing like reading a Yates story for the first time. Like something out of Dante, these characters are miserable, wallowing in the wake of failed ambitions. The pathos is intense but never sentimentalized. We feel terrible for them, as if Yates were saying, "Look at these poor souls," but as in The Inferno, the author is the one who condemned them in the first place.

It’s a fate that Yates himself, with the publication of The Collected Stories, may have just avoided.

Bibliography

Revolutionary Road (1961)
Eleven Kinds of Loneliness (1962)
A Special Providence (1969)
Disturbing the Peace (1975)
The Easter Parade (1976)
A Good School (1978)
Liars in Love (1981)
Young Hearts Crying (1984)
Cold Spring Harbor (1986)
The Collected Stories (2001)