Papers of Richard Yates (1977) documenting the life and literary career of the noted Yonkers, New York-born American novelist and short story writer, who chronicled the "age of anxiety" and was a creative writing educator at the University of Southern California, and other universities; consisting of bound uncorrected galley proofs of The Easter Parade: A Novel (1977).
Richard Yates was born Richard Walden Yates, on 3 February 1926, in Yonkers, NY. After attending boarding school in Avon, Connecticut, Yates joined the Army and served in France and Germany during World War II. After returning he became a journalist and ghost writer, most notably as a speech-writer for Attorney General Robert Kennedy (1963). Aside from his writing career, Yates also taught English and writing at several American universities, from 1959 till his retirement in 1992. Most notably, he taught at the University of Iowa from 1966 to 1992. Yates died of emphysema and complications from minor surgery, on 7 November 1992, in Birmingham, Alabama.
Yates began his career as a novelist, in 1961, with the publication of Revolutionary Road. The book was widely acclaimed and set the tone for all of his works to come. Yates books were a part of a new literary style that came out during the mid-20th century; this style was called the Age of Anxiety. This along with an autobiographical theme would become known as his writing style.
Sources:
"Richard Yates Papers (1926-1992)" Howard Gotlieb Archival Research Center, Boston University, Boston, MA. http://hgar-srv3.bu.edu/collections/collection?id=123024
"Richard Yates". [Biographical Sketch] Literature Resource Center. 20 April 2007. Accessed 25 October 2016.
"Richard Yates (novelist)". [Biographical Sketch] Wikipedia. Accessed 25 October 2016. Author: Jonathan Dembo, with the assistance of John Leche, 10/25/2016
Stuart Wright collected and compiled the Richard Yates Papers. He was born, Stuart Thurman Wright, on 30 March 1948, in Roxboro, North Carolina. He was the son of Frances Critcher Wright (1919-2010) and Wallace Lyndon Wright (1921-1965). An avid reader as a boy, Wright developed a strong interest in the American Civil War and with his father toured many of the war's battlefields searching for artifacts and studying the history of the era. At the age of 12, he won a statewide "Johnny Reb" essay contest and by the age of 15 had visited every major battlefield of the Civil War. Wright attended Roxboro High School, from which he graduated in 1966. It was during these years that he developed an interest in collecting historical books and manuscripts and began relationships with a number of local collectors and dealers.
In the fall of 1966, Wright enrolled at Wake Forest University as a pre-med, history, German and music student. Wright earned a B.A. in German and music in 1970. As a graduate student at Wake Forest University, Wright focused his studies on Southern history and literature, his ambition being to build an authoritative Southern Studies collection for the university. He received a master's degree in Southern Studies in 1973 and a second master's degree in U.S. History in 1980. Additionally Wright holds a professional degree from England in a medically related field. It was while studying there that he became interested in Thomas Wolfe, the noted North Carolina native and novelist.
Following his graduation from Wake Forest, Wright began to develop his collections more systematically, acquiring many first editions of Southern writers. In 1976 he began teaching at Reynolda House, a Wake Forest University affiliate dedicated to the arts and arts education. Wright taught classes in American music as well as human anatomy for art students. In 1978 Wright became Lecturer in Education at Wake Forest University. During his 10 years teaching at Wake Forest University, Wright authored numerous works of Civil War and North Carolina history, and dozens of articles, bibliographies, essays and reviews on Southern literature and the writers whose papers he collected. In addition, he developed a strong interest in the writings of the English poet Donald Davie and the Minnesota-born poet Richard Eberhart, whose works he also collected.
At the same time, Wright also began a career as a publisher by starting Palaemon Press in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. By 1984, Palaemon Press had produced 316 titles, consisting mainly of broadsides and limited editions, of the poetry and essays of such Southern writers as A. R. Ammons, Fred Chappell, James Dickey, William Goyen, George Garrett, and Eudora Welty. He also built comprehensive collections and compiled book-length descriptive bibliographies of A.R. Ammons, Andrew Lytle, Reynolds Price, James Dickey, William Goyen, Walker Percy, Randall Jarrell, Peter Taylor, George Garrett, Richard Eberhart, and Donald Davie. As well as serving as editor of the contemporary literature section of the Bulletin of Bibliography throughout the 1980s, Wright also contributed pioneering checklists of the writings of Southern poets Henry Taylor, Charles Wright, and Robert Morgan. For Meckler Publishing he served as series editor for a number of book-length bibliographies and checklists. In recognition of these accomplishments, when he was just 32, Wright was elected to membership in New York's prestigious Grolier Club.
All of these works are represented in the Stuart Wright Collection. In his dealings with these various authors Wright made consistent efforts to acquire personal papers, letters and documents, photographs, manuscripts, drafts, proofs, and published materials to supplement his continuing activities as a purchaser of their works. In this way, Wright acquired perhaps a majority of his overall collection. Over the years a number of biographers used Wright's collection to aid their research. For example, James A. Grimshaw, Jr. used the collection extensively for his Robert Penn Warren: A Descriptive Bibliography, 1922-1979 published by the University Press of Virginia, in 1981 and Craig S. Abbott did so as well for John Crowe Ransom: A Descriptive Bibliography, published by Whitston Publishing Company, Inc. in 1999. Joseph Blotner also used the Wright collection in researching Robert Penn Warren: A Biography, published by Random House in 1997.
Nevertheless, from the mid- to late 1980s, Wright began to look for a permanent home for his collection, which he felt had grown too large and yet had been too little used. Unable to find a repository willing to accept the entire collection under suitable conditions, he sold a number of individual author collections to Vanderbilt University, Duke University, the University of Texas at Austin, and Emory University. It was not until 2010 that he reached agreement to house the remaining, and largest part of his collection at East Carolina University. The Stuart Wright Collection in the East Carolina Manuscript Collection of J.Y. Joyner Library includes 106 sub-collections of the papers of Southern American writers, illustrators, composers, and publishers. The related Stuart Wright Book Collection holds several thousand volumes by or about many of the same writers. Many of these volumes contain annotations, inscriptions, and insertions that reveal much about the authors in the collection and their relationships with one another. In 1998 Wright moved to England, and since 2001 he has resided in the medieval market town of Ludlow, in Shropshire.
Author: Jonathan Dembo, 11/2/2016
The Stuart Wright Collection: Richard Yates Papers (1977) documenting the life and literary career of by Richard Yates (1926-1992), the noted Yonkers, New York-born American novelist and short story writer of the "age of anxiety" and creative writing educator at the University of Southern California, and other universities; consisting of loose manuscript items transferred from the Stuart Wright Book Collection. The Richard Yates Papers are arranged, in original order, in a single series.
Series 1: Cary Addition #1 to the Stuart Wright Collection consist of papers (1977) documenting the life and literary career of by Richard Yates (1926-1992), including an uncorrected galley proof of The Easter Parade: A Novel (1977), by Richard Yates. Series 1 is housed in Box 1.a.
Purchased from Stuart Wright, 10/27/2011.
Processing, Preliminary inventory & Container List, by Jonathan Dembo, with the assistance of Nathaniel King & Dale Wetterhahn, 12/8/2015, 2/10/2016, 3/14/2016; Final inventory by Jonathan Dembo, 9/20/2016; Finding aid by Jonathan Dembo, 9/20/2016; Biographical Sketch, by Jonathan Dembo with the assistance of John Leche, 10/25/2016, rev. 2/1/2017; Encoding revised by Jonathan Dembo, 2/1/2017.
Literary rights to specific documents are retained by the authors or their descendants in accordance with U.S. copyright law.
English