Young Hearts Crying

364 Pages·2009·1.45 MB·English

by  Richard Yates

Acclaim for Richard Yates
“One of America’s best-kept secrets.… Keenly insightful, brutally honest … delivering a swift
kick to the heart.”
—The Denver Post
“Yates writes powerfully and enters completely and effortlessly into the lives of his characters.”
—The New York Times Book Review
“[Yates] is an expert.” —Time
“Soft-spoken in his prose and terrifyingly accurate in his dialogue, Yates renders his characters
with such authenticity that you hardly realize what he’s done.” —The Boston Globe
“What’s exhilarating about Yates is not his grasp of The Truth, but the purity of his vision and
the perfection of his craft.”
—Newsday
“Richard Yates is a writer of commanding gifts. His prose is urbane yet sensitive, with passion
and irony held deftly in balance. And he provides unexpected pleasures in a flood of freshly
minted phrases and in the thrust of sudden insight, precise notation of feeling, and mordant
unsentimental perceptions.”
—Saturday Review
“It is Yates’s relentless, unflinching investigation of our secret hearts, and his speaking to us in
language as clear and honest and unadorned and unsentimental and uncompromising as his
vision, that makes him such a great writer.” —Richard Russo
“Mr. Yates’s eye and ear are, I believe, unsurpassed; I know of no writer whose senses are in
more admirable condition. It is they that make his characters live, make these stories move and
beat—they, and possibly another asset, the sure perfection of his writing.” —Dorothy Parker,
Esquire
“If more is needed to make a masterpiece in modern American fiction [Revolutionary Road], I am
sure I don’t know what it is.”
—Tennessee Williams
Richard Yates
Young Hearts Crying
Richard Yates was born in 1926. The author of several acclaimed works of fiction, including
Revolutionary Road, Eleven Kinds of Loneliness, Disturbing the Peace, and The Easter Parade, he was
lauded during his lifetime as the foremost novelist of the postwar “age of anxiety.” He died in
1992.
Books by Richard Yates
Revolutionary Road
Eleven Kinds of Loneliness
A Special Providence
Disturbing the Peace
The Easter Parade
A Good School
Liars in Love
Young Hearts Crying
Cold Spring Harbor
The Collected Stories of Richard Yates

FIRST VINTAGE CONTEMPORARIES EDITION, MARCH 2009
Copyright © 1984 by Richard Yates
All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random
House, Inc., New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Young
Hearts Crying was originally published in the United States by Delacorte Press/Seymour
Lawrence, New York, in 1984.
Vintage and colophon are registered trademarks and Vintage Contemporaries is a trademark of
Random House, Inc.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the
author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead,
events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following for permission to reprint previously published
material:
Hal Leonard Corporation: Excerpt from “I Want to Hold Your Hand” words and music by John
Lennon and Paul McCartney, copyright © 1963 by Northern Songs Ltd., copyright renewed. All
rights in the United States and Canada controlled and administered by Songs of Universal, Inc.
All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission of Hal Leonard Corporation.
New Directions Publishing Corp.: Brief excerpts from “Scene Two” and “Scene Four” from A
Streetcar Named Desire by Tennessee Williams, copyright © 1947 by The University of the
South. Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corp.
Viking Penguin, a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.: “Watching the Needle-boats at San
Sabba” from Collected Poems by James Joyce, copyright © 1918 by B. W. Huebsch, Inc., 1927,
1936 by James Joyce, 1946 by Nora Joyce. Reprinted by permission of Viking Penguin, a
division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.
The Cataloging-in-Publication Data is on file at the Library of Congress.
eISBN: 978-0-30777265-7
www.vintagebooks.com
v3.1
To my three daughters
CONTENTS
Cover
About the Author
Other Books by This Author
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
PART ONE
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
PART TWO
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
PART THREE
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Also by Richard Yates