"I've also discovered at long last what you knew from the beginning—that my "broods" do not stem from any dark, Hamlet-like neurosis, incurable and tragic, but from plain laziness . . . I've pulled myself out of [several really major broods since you left] by the more painful but no less effective method of telling myself to shut up and get back to the typewriter. I'm not saying I've overcome them—I had a bad one just the other day—but I'm holding my own against the bastards. They don't immobilize me any more, and I'm confident it won't be long before I'll be able to brush them off like flies. Yates appears here as an almost perfect character out of his own imagination—one of those deterministic victims who "rush around trying to do their best . . . doing what they can't help doing, ultimately and inevitably failing because they can't help being the people they are.""
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Novelists from the United StatesAcademics from the United StatesShort story writers from the United StatesPeople from New York City
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Extract from a 1953 letter by Richard Yates (then living in a basement flat in London, to write) to his first wife Sheila (who had by then gone back with their infant daughter to the USA); plus a comment by Blake Bailey about this passage. (Yates himself returned to his native USA turf in September 1953.) Chapter 5, "The getaway: 1951-1953", at p.149
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Richard Yates
Richard Yates (February 3, 1926 – November 7, 1992) was an American fiction writer. His first novel, "Revolutionary Road" (1961), was a finalist for the 1962 National Book Award and is listed in Time Magazine's 100 Best Novels.
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