Richard Yates: Loneliness in Post-war America

The purpose of this thesis is to illustrate an analysis of Richard Yates’ collection of short stories entitled Eleven Kinds of Loneliness, which is inspired by American society during the 1950s. This historical period is being described as the main source that permitted Americans to focus their attention to fulfill the ideals of mass consumerism, abundance, and strict social roles. Eleven Kinds of Loneliness provides a multitude of different points of view, which are important to read American society as it is, the collection helps with the understanding of American society of the 50s by narrating about the reality of American life with its flaws and necessities. In the first chapter, I introduce the American socio-economic situation to show the basic ideals that characterized American society in its post-war years after the conclusion of the Second World War. An insight of macro-topics is provided, by starting from an historical background given by Woods’ Quest for Identity, moving forward to an analysis of the economics, all the references are taken by works such as Mills’ White Collar and Cohen’s A Consumers Republic, and lastly, the family as it is deeply analyzed in May’s Homeward Bound. Those are some of the works used to give a proper quantity of information that are necessary for the understanding of the second part that will follow. The second chapter focuses on Richard Yates, as he is an author that decided to give a voice to all the people that did not conform to all the American ideals. The chapter starts with Yates’ biography and bibliography, his writing techniques and the main themes present in his literary art. Those topics are going to be used as a reference in order to understand the techniques, the protagonists and main themes that are present in Eleven Kinds of Loneliness, which is the case study of this thesis. My research on Yates’ novel shows that, despite the 50s are considered a period of great evolution, abundance and consumerism not everyone was able to achieve this kind of lifestyle and instead, as it can be seen from the analysis of Eleven Kinds of Loneliness, many found difficulties in conforming to the standards and, in order to reach the perfect American life, they just fell deeper into their own loneliness after having built their lives on lies.