A window into short-story construction: Richard Yates’ “Builders” and questions of the autobiographical content of his work
Karl Wood
Kazimierz Wielki University in Bydgoszcz, PolandKarl Wood is on the staff of the Department of Anglophone Literatures in English at Kazimierz Wielki University in Bydgoszcz, Poland, where he teaches courses in American Cultural Studies. His research interests and publications have included several shorter works on the work of Richard Yates and on twentieth century US-American culture, as well as work related to transnational spa culture in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. He is a member of the Department’s team participating in the Horizon-2020 DIGITENS project, an international research consortium on forms of sociability in the long eighteenth century.
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-4042-1307
Abstract
Richard Yates, most remembered for his Revolutionary Road (1961), was also the author of two fine and exceptionally well-crafted collections of short stories, Eleven Kinds of Loneliness (1963) and Liars in Love (1981). Yates was a writer of exceptional perception and unflinching clarity, yet some have criticized his work as drawing too heavily on autobiographical content. This article seeks to examine Yates’ 1963 story “Builders” to gain insight into this extraordinary author’s understanding of the writing process, his use of autobiographical or semi-autobiographical content, and to suggest new approaches for work on this still under-appreciated twentieth century author.
Keywords:
Richard Yates, autofiction, self-narrative, short stories.References
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Kazimierz Wielki University in Bydgoszcz, Poland
Karl Wood is on the staff of the Department of Anglophone Literatures in English at Kazimierz Wielki University in Bydgoszcz, Poland, where he teaches courses in American Cultural Studies. His research interests and publications have included several shorter works on the work of Richard Yates and on twentieth century US-American culture, as well as work related to transnational spa culture in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. He is a member of the Department’s team participating in the Horizon-2020 DIGITENS project, an international research consortium on forms of sociability in the long eighteenth century.
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-4042-1307
