He seemed decent and kindly enough, but Prentice was cautioned by an old and trusted rule of his schooldays: Beware of the first friendly one; he's p… - Richard Yates

exchanging agreeable remarks for no other purpose than to keep silence from closing in.

At the time of [Richard Yates's] death the novel [Uncertain Times] was perhaps two-thirds finished: about 250 pages of narrative in various stages of revision.

Had dinner tonight with an old boyhood friend from the years 1937-39 when I lived in a town called Scarborough [i.e. Stephen Benedict], whose amateur theatre group ("The Beechwood Players") served as the original for "The Laurel Players" in my book. He found it incredible, and I found it spooky, that I had completely failed to remember the name of a winding blacktop road in that town on which he and I and many of our schoolmates used to pass the most impressionable hours of our formative years: "Revolutionary Road".