Yates, Richard

The American author Richard Yates was born in Yonkers, New York. His parents divorced when he was three years old, and as a child Yates lived a peripatetic life with his sister and his artistic but alcoholic mother to whom he was strongly attached. During his final year at school he attended Avon Old Farms, a boarding school for boys in Connecticut. He then enlisted in the army and was sent to Europe at the end of the Second World War.