Yates was also an acclaimed author of short stories. "Eleven Kinds of Loneliness", Yates' first collection, followed the publication of his first novel, "Revolutionary Road," by a single year. It was compared favorably to Joyce's "Dubliners" (all but one of its stories take place in and around the boroughs of New York City rather than Joyce's Dublin) and eventually achieved a kind of cult status among fiction writers despite its relative obscurity. One later "New York Times" essay by Robert Towers praised Yates' "exposure of the small fiercely defended dignities and much vaster humiliations of characters who might have been picked almost at random from the fat telephone book of the Borough of Queens."