Start with Revolutionary road. This is one of the few cases where the famous book is unarguably the right entry: it is his first novel, his best, and the one whose method — long scenes of people performing versions of themselves that neither the reader nor eventually the characters can believe — is easiest to see working.
The alternative worth considering is Eleven kinds of loneliness, the first story collection. It is the better argument for Yates as a technician, and if you find the novel's bleakness hard to sit with over three hundred pages, the stories deliver the same thing in twenty-page doses. Start there if that describes you; otherwise take the novel.
The second tier, which is where the real question is
The Easter parade is the one to read next, and a serious minority of readers think it is better than Revolutionary road. It follows two sisters over forty years, it opens with a sentence that tells you exactly how it ends, and it is shorter and colder than the first novel. If Yates is going to hold you, this is the book that settles it.
A good school is the boarding-school novel, and it is the gentlest thing he wrote — genuinely warm in places, which nothing else in the list is. It is also the shortest of the novels and a reasonable third stop.
The rest of the novels
A Special Providence is generally held to be the weakest, an assessment Yates broadly shared; it is the war novel that did not come off. Disturbing the Peace is the alcoholism novel and the hardest to read for reasons that are not aesthetic. Young hearts crying and Cold Spring Harbor are the late books, and the standard view is that the material thins as the career goes on — the same marriages, the same evasions, less pressure behind them.
Liars in love is the second story collection and holds up considerably better than the late novels. If you are reading only one more book after the first three, make it this.
The Collected Stories of Richard Yates gathers both published collections plus previously uncollected work, and is the efficient purchase if the stories are what you came for — it makes Eleven kinds of loneliness and Liars in love redundant as separate buys.
One warning about the whole shelf
Yates writes about disappointment, alcoholism and self-deception, and he does it without irony or relief. There is no book in this list that lets up. Read the novels spaced out rather than consecutively; readers who binge them report the same thing, which is that the cumulative effect flattens rather than deepens.
The life
A Tragic Honesty by Blake Bailey is the standard biography and is a genuinely useful companion, because so much of Yates's fiction draws directly on his own circumstances — the mother, the marriages, the money, the hospitals. It is long and it is unsparing. Read it after the fiction, not before, or you will spend the novels playing spot-the-source.
Where to stop
Revolutionary road, The Easter parade, and one of the story collections is the honest recommendation for most readers. That is three books and it is nearly all of the Yates worth having. Everything else is for people who found those three and wanted more of exactly that. The full sequence is on the path below.
Follow the full ordered path here: Richard Yates in Order: What to Read After Revolutionary Road.
