- Geboren: 3. Februar 1926 in Yonkers, New York (USA)
- Gestorben: 7. November 1992 in Birmingham, Alabama (USA)
In den Fünfziger- und Sechzigerjahren gefeiert, danach so gut
wie vergessen. erst die Verfilmung seines größten Erfolges
brachte ihm wieder Aufmerksamkeit – die er nicht mehr
erlebte.
Der gern zitiert Aufsatz von
Stewart O'Nan (siehe Link), ursprünglich im Herbst 1999 in der
Boston Review erschienen, beschreibt Yates so: Yates
doesn't fit the mold of a writer's writer. He's
not a linguistic acrobat like Nabokov or a highflying fabulist
like Steven Millhauser, not a uniquely intellectual or obsessive
writer the way we think of William Gaddis or Harold Brodkey. In
the era that saw Pynchon, DeLillo and Rushdie make their names
(before storming the bestseller lists), he wrote about the
mundane sadness of domestic life in language that rarely if ever
draws attention to itself. There's nothing fussy or
pretentious about his style. If anything, his work could be
called simple or traditional, conventional, free of the
metafictionalists' or even the modernists' tricks. The
only writer's writer he might be compared to would be
Chekhov, or perhaps Fitzgerald, though without Fitzgerald's
poetic flair.
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