Reading order
| # | Title | Published | Author | Buy on Amazon |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Short Story 1 | 1958 | Richard Yates | Buy |
| 2 | Ploughshares Spring 1976 Guest-Edited by Tim O’Brien with DeWitt Henry and Henry Bromell | 1976 | Richard Yates | Buy |
| 3 | Ploughshares Vol. 5 No. 3 | 1979 | Richard Yates | Buy |
| 4 | Ploughshares Fall 1988 | 1988 | Richard Yates | Buy |
| 5 | The Eloquent Short Story: An Anthology of Narrative Styles | 2004 | Richard Yates | Buy |
| 6 | Children Playing Before a Statue of Hercules | 2005 | Richard Yates | Buy |
| 7 | The New Granta Book of the American Short Story | 2007 | Richard Yates | Buy |
| 8 | Stories to Get You Through the Night | 2010 | Richard Yates | Buy |
| 9 | Ploughshares Fall/Winter 1981 | 2013 | Richard Yates | Buy |
Richard Yates’s short fiction has appeared in numerous anthologies. He contributed to multiple issues of Ploughshares literary journal and his work has been reprinted in collections like Children Playing Before a Statue of Hercules (2005), The New Granta Book of the American Short Story (2007), and Stories to Get You Through the Night (2010).
Yates is best known for his novel Revolutionary Road (1961), but his short stories earned him a reputation as one of the finest American realists of the 20th century. His anthology appearances span from 1958 to the 2010s, with editors continuing to select his work for new collections decades after his death in 1992. The Ploughshares contributions came during his lifetime, while the later anthologies are posthumous selections.
His stories tend to focus on middle-class American disappointment, failed ambition, and marriages under strain. The anthology entries listed here offer access to individual Yates stories without requiring readers to track down his original collections, Eleven Kinds of Loneliness (1962) and Liars in Love (1981).