Just discovered an interesting alcoholic writer:
nytimes.com/2003/08/03/books … UTHER.html
Anybody ever read him?
tbns.net/elevenkinds/elevenkinds.index.html
this website seems devoted to him
just to wet / whet your appetite:
The Los Angeles Times, July 9, 1989
It was the kind of propitious beginning that most young writers can only dream about, and, by all counts, it should have signaled a career of celebrity and honors. Richard Yates was 36 years old and his first novel, "Revolutionary Road,"published in 1961, had garnered not the elliptical adjectives that constitutethe usual dust-jacket blurbs, but whole sentences, an entire trumpeting paragraph, from no less than the country’s pre-eminent living playwright,Tennessee Williams:
“Here is more than fine writing; here is what, added to fine writing, makes a book come immediately, intensely, and brilliantly alive. If more is needed to make a masterpiece in modern American fiction, I am sure I don’t know what it is.” Since then, a veritable Who’s Who of writers has jumped in with ebullient praise for Yates’ literary prowess. Kurt Vonnegut has called “Revolutionary Road” " `The Great Gatsby’ of my time." Critic James Atlas declares it’s “one of the few novels I know that could be called flawless.”