Richard Yates

Yates grew up in a fractured, downwardly mobile family around Yonkers and New York City, was discharged from the army after a bout of pneumonia that scarred his lungs, and spent his twenties and thirties grinding out corporate speeches and freelance journalism while chipping away at fiction, all while wrestling with the alcoholism and manic depression that would hospitalize him repeatedly.

Revolutionary Road, a finalist for the National Book Award it lost to Walker Percy's The Moviegoer, dissected a young Connecticut couple's suburban marriage as it curdles under their shared conviction that they're too special for the ordinary life they've built: a diagnosis so exact that Kurt Vonnegut and Tennessee Williams both called it a masterpiece even as it sold poorly.

He supported himself for decades teaching creative writing, in and out of psychiatric wards, drinking heavily, largely out of print by the time he died in 1992. A wave of reissues and a 2008 film adaptation later restored him to the center of American realism, an influence Richard Ford and others had quietly credited all along.