“He smoked constantly despite tuberculosis, emphysema, and repeated bouts of pneumonia; he was an alcoholic who, when unable to write, would sometimes start the day with martinis at breakfast; he rarely exercised, and ate red meat at every meal if he could help it.”

Is the pursuit of art a greater good than a pursuit of happiness? Are they mutually exclusive? If you’re Richard Yates, those are probably stupid questions. If you’re a writer worth a damn, you don’t have a choice anyway, so shut up and pass the bottle. The booze feels warm in your stomach, and that’s about as much as we need to say on the subject.

I’ve read plenty of literary biographies in my time, but if you believe Blake Bailey’s A Tragic Honesty, there wasn’t a bigger asshole or a greater artist than Richard Yates. In 20th century terms, the man was old-school all the way down his tweeds. He smoked five packs of cigarettes a day and called it heroic. He drank constantly and called anyone who wouldn’t match him drink for drink a “fucking pansy.” Going on the wagon meant switching to beer for breakfast. He hit on every attractive woman he ever met, and cursed fat women as an abomination before his eyes.

He demanded realism from every word in his fiction; a misplaced semi-colon exposed a lazy hack without craft. When asked by editors to soften his characters or their predicaments, he refused, stating simply that life is invariably sad. He fought against sentiment (“What a crock of shit!”) and loathed post-realists (“What a load of crap!”). His literary heroes were Flaubert and Fitzgerald, but it was the latter’s golden years that haunted his dreams, even when The Crack Up described his life. His books were usually out of print, despite cries of injustice from his far more successful friends like William Styron, Kurt Vonnegut and Richard Ford. His masterpiece is Revolutionary Road (though some argue for The Easter Parade), the sharpest evocation (this side of Gatsby) of the disparity between a man’s private hopes for himself and the crushing reality of his life. Everyone wants to feel special and better than his circumstances, and the mental gymnastics required to sustain those necessary illusions cannot prevent the world from intervening. Time after time, Yates shows how a man’s yearning is not enough to prevent him from being who he can’t help but be. It’s the difference between who we hope to be and who we are that makes his work so poignant, even wrenching, because you can’t help but painfully recognize yourself in his characters, and it’s a mirror that will not distort itself to your wishes.

His own mirror could not always have been welcome. He charmed everyone before insulting them, and smashed far more relationships than he maintained. Given his frequent drunken rages, it’s a testament to his good moments how many pledged (and delivered) undying loyalty. He lived in squalor most of his life, hunched over his desk with a cigarette jutting from his mouth, cockroaches crackling under his desert boots. His apartments terrified his children. And yet, he kept writing - even at the end, when he needed oxygen tanks to breathe and skipped back and forth between drags on the tank and his smoke.

Americans like their endings happy, and Yates’ books all end badly, which might explain in part why despite the desperate pleadings from members of the literary elite, Yates’ nose is still pressed up against the glass of academic acceptance into the canon. Given that professors are more apt to discuss theory than novels, Yates’ realistic storytelling probably leaves many without the stylistic innovations or structural experimentation to play with. So be it. But if anybody’s reading in fifty years and if genetic engineering has not yet spliced its way around the vagaries of the human heart, people will still be reading Richard Yates.