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At the time of his death in 1992, Richard Yates was remembered only vaguely for his first novel, Revolutionary Road, which in 1961 placed second to Walker Percy's The Moviegoer for the National Book Award. Despite a literary output of seven novels, including The Easter Parade (1976) and A Good School (1978), and two collections of short stories, notably Eleven Kinds of Loneliness (1962) and Liars in Love (1981), Yates was a forlorn and forgotten figure at the end of his life, with his books out of print.
Nearly a decade later a Yates revival was initiated by the publication of The Collected Stories of Richard Yates, which became a national bestseller and prompted new editions of his better novels. The Collected Stones includes everything in his short story collections as well as nine uncollected stories. An admiring introduction by Richard Russo provides a useful context for appreciating Yates's short fiction, particularly his indebtedness to Fitzgerald and his place in the history of the short story from Chekhov to Raymond Carver. Although never a commercial success, Yates was a meticulous craftsman who was widely regarded as a "writer's writer" by his contemporaries.
Yates drew unsparingly on his life for material, and readers of his short stories...