A writer revived

by Dan Wakefield

Originally published on February 9, 2009

“The only time I saw Dick Yates without his jacket was a freezing winter night when I took a bag of groceries to his barren, one-room apartment on Commonwealth Avenue…The room was lit by the eerie blue flames of a gas stove and heated by an oven whose door was open. With his sallow face and gray beard, his arms folded over his chest, his thin, gangly body hunched against the cold, he seemed like a doomed character from Dostoevsky.”