Richard Yates

In the hopeful 1950s, Frank and April Wheeler appear to be a model couple: bright, beautiful, talented, with two young children and a starter home in the suburbs. Perhaps they married too young and started a family too early. Maybe Frank's job is dull. And April never saw herself as a housewife. Yet they have always lived on the assumption that greatness is only just around the corner. But now that certainty is now about to crumble. With heartbreaking compassion and remorseless clarity, Richard Yates shows how Frank and April mortgage their spiritual birthright, betraying not only each other, but their best selves.

Amy Logan had a robot named Herman, a mystery-writing aunt, and the bluest China doll eyes Todd Cunningham had ever seen! The night her musical bed woke the neighbors, Todd came to investigate--and discovered the lovely inventor in baby-doll pajamas that made the dazzled judge beg for mercy--and a kiss. Embracing Todd reminded Amy that it was time to put her grief away, to risk letting a new man touch her heart. But fear made her pull away from the future his gaze beckoned her to share. Could a man with a stuffy, responsible job and a perfect bronzed body really find happiness with an impulsive imp like her?

In a small Long Island town during the first months of World War II, Evan Shepard, a young machinist married for the second time, agrees to share a house with his wife's family and becomes torn by divided loyalties.

"'Liars in Love' has seven solid stories from the late, great, Richard Yates. If you're familiar with Yates from 'Revolutionary Road' or his other novels or short stories, you'll know that you're in for a bumpy ride with his cast of characters. Habitually reaching for a cocktail or lighting a cigarette, the Yates characters are never a happy lot. These stories are no excception. The stories are heavily autobiographical and coincide with much of the material in a terrific Yates biography, 'A Tragic Honesty.' The lead male charcaters (Jack Fields, Bill Grove, et. al) are all Yates at various stages of his life, from little boy in the first story to middle aged down on his luck writer in the final story. The two best stories are indeed the first, 'Oh Joseph I'm So Tired,' where his mother is once again the object of ridicule, and the last, 'Saying Goodbye to Sally,' which chronicles Yates' time in Hollywood when he worked on a screenplay for John Frankenheimer on a movie that was never made."--Amazon.com.

In Young Hearts Crying, Yates movingly portrays a man and a woman from their courtship and marriage in the 1950s to their divorce in the 70s, chronicling their heartbreaking attempts to reach their highest ambitions. Michael Davenport dreams of being a poet after returning home from World War II in Europe, and at first he and his new wife Lucy enjoy their life together. But as the decades pass and the success of others creates an oppressive fear of failure in both Michael and Lucy, their once bright future gives way to a life of adultery and isolation.

Even as little girls, Sarah and Emily are very different from each other. Emily looks up to her wiser and more stable older sister and is jealous of her relationship with their absent father, and later her seemingly golden marriage. The path she chooses for herself is less safe and conventional and her love affairs never really satisfy her. Although the bond between them endures, gradually the distance between the two women grows, until a tragic event throws their relationship into focus one last time. Richard Yates's masterful novel follows the two sisters from their childhood in the 1920s through the challenges of their adult choices, and depicts the different ways they seek to escape from their tarnished family past.

In this work, he offers a spare and autumnal novel about a New England prep school. At once a meditation on the twilight of youth and an examination of America's entry into World War II, A Good School tells the stories of William Grove, the quiet boy who becomes an editor of the school newspaper; Jack Draper, a crippled chemistry teacher; and Edith Stone, the schoolmaster's young daughter, who falls in love with most celebrated boy in the class of 1943.

The marriage of Harvard graduate and budding poet and playwright Michael Davenport to radiant Radcliffe graduate Lucy Blaine founders under the strain of Lucy's million-dollar inheritance and the struggles of Michael's writing career.

Rip Van Winkle / Washington Irving [Young Goodman Brown]( / Nathaniel Hawthorne [Fall of the House of Usher]( / Edgar Allan Poe The lightning-rod man / Herman Melville The diamond lens / Fitzjames O'Brien The celebrated jumping frog of Calaveras County / Mark Twain The outcasts of Poker Flat / Bret Harte [Damned Thing]( / Ambrose Bierce The turn of the screw / Henry James The Hiltons' holiday / Sarah Orne Jewett The gift of the Magi / O. Henry The moving finger / Edith Wharton The open boat / Stephen Crane Lou, the prophet / Willa Cather The men of Forty Mile / Jack London Babylon revisited / F. Scott Fitzgerald [A rose for Emily]( William Faulkner Big two-hearted river / Ernest Hemingway Flight / John Steinbeck