Young Hearts Crying

Zusatztext “To me and to many other writers of my generation! the work of Richard Yates came as a liberating force. . . . He was one of the most important writers of the second half of the century.”—Robert Stone Informationen zum Autor Richard Yates  was born in 1926 in New York and lived in California. His prize-winning stories began to appear in 1953 and his first novel,  Revolutionary Road , was nominated for the National Book Award in 1961. He is the author of eight other works, including the novels  A Good School, The Easter Parade, and Disturbing the Peace, and two collections of short stories, Eleven Kinds of Loneliness and Liars in Love . He died in 1992. Klappentext In Young Hearts Crying , Yates movingly portrays a man and a woman from their courtship and marriage in the 1950s to their divorce in the 70s, chronicling their heartbreaking attempts to reach their highest ambitions. Michael Davenport dreams of being a poet after returning home from World War II Europe, and at first he and his new wife Lucy enjoy their life together. But as the decades pass and the success of others creates an oppressive fear of failure in both Michael and Lucy, their once bright future gives way to a life of adultery and isolation. With empathy and grace, Yates creates a poignant novel of the desires and disasters of a tragic, hopeful couple. Leseprobe Chapter One By the time he was twenty-three, Michael Davenport had learned to trust his own skepticism. He didn't have much patience with myths or legends of any kind, even those that took the form of general assumptions; what he wanted, always, was to get down to the real story. He had come of age as a waist-gunner on a B-17, toward the end of the war in Europe, and one of the things he'd liked least about the Army Air Force was its public-relations program. Everybody thought the Air Force was the luckiest, happiest branch of the service—better fed and quartered and paid than any other, given more personal freedom, given good clothes to be worn in a "casual" style. Everybody understood, too, that the Air Force couldn't be bothered with the petty side of military discipline: Flying and daring and high comradeship were esteemed over any blind respect for rank; officers and enlisted men could pal around together, if they felt like it, and even the regulation Army salute became a curled-up, thrown-away little mockery of itself in their hands. Soldiers of the ground forces were said to refer to them, enviously, as fly-boys. And all that stuff was probably harmless enough; it wasn't worth getting into any arguments about; but Michael Davenport would always know that his own Air Force years had been humbling and tedious and bleak, that his times in combat had come close to scaring the life out of him, and that he'd been enormously glad to get out of the whole lousy business when it was over. Still, he did bring home a few good memories. One was that he had lasted through the semifinals as a middieweight in the boxing tournament at Blanchard Field, Texas--not many other lawyers' sons from Morristown, New Jersey, could claim a thing like that. Another, which came to take on philosophical proportions the more he thought about it, was a remark made one sweltering afternoon by some nameless Blanchard Field gunnery instructor in the course of an otherwise boring lecture. "Try to remember this, men. The mark of a professional in any line of work—I mean any line of work—is that he can make difficult things look easy." And even then, brought awake among the sleepy trainees by that piercing idea, Michael had known for some time what line of work it was that he wanted eventually to make his mark in as a professional: he wanted to write poems and plays. As soon as the Army set him free he went to Harvard, mostly because that wa...

Dettagli sul prodotto

• Autori: Richard Yates
• Editore: Vintage USA
• Lingue: Inglese
• Formato: Tascabile
• Pubblicazione: 10.03.2009
• EAN: 9780307455963
• ISBN: 978-0-307-45596-3
• Pagine: 432
• Dimensioni: 133 mm x 205 mm x 22 mm
• Serie: VINTAGE BOOKS; Vintage Contemporaries; Vintage Contemporaries; Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
• Categoria: Narrativa > Romanzi