A lifelong New Yorker, Yglesias’s eye for city life — ambition, privilege, class struggle, and the clash of cultures — informs much of his work. Psychiatrists and psychoanalysts are often primary characters in Yglesias’s narratives, and titles such as The Murderer Next Door (1991) and Dr. Neruda’s Cure for Evil (1998) draw heavily on the intellectual traditions of psychology.
Yglesias lives in New York’s Upper East Side.
Yglesias with Tamar Cole, his half-sister from his mother’s first marriage, around 1955. He was raised with Tamar and his half-brother, Lewis.
Yglesias sits atop his half-brother Lewis Cole’s shoulders around 1956. As adults, Yglesias and Cole worked together writing screenplays for ten years. All of them were sold, but none were ultimately made.
Yglesias at age ten, in a car with his mother in his father’s hometown of Ybor City in Tampa, Florida. Around this time, Yglesias lived in Spain for a year, an experience that proved formative in his young life.
Georgia Yglesias, Rafael’s paternal grandmother, is shown here relaxing in Central Park with Rafael and his father. Yglesias’s relationship with his grandmother was an important part of his childhood.
Pages from a travel book that Yglesias and his mother wrote together, dated from Paris in early October 1964. Though his mother did most of the writing, Yglesias considers this to be the first thing he ever wrote.
Yglesias typed and signed this letter in 1969, just months before beginning work on his first novel, Hide Fox, and All After (1972). The letter references Yglesias’s decision to drop out of school and begin writing fulltime, a biographical detail that is paralleled in Hide Fox.
A photo of Yglesias taken by his late wife, Margaret, in the early 1970s, the first summer they were together as a couple.
Yglesias with his parents at their summer house in Maine.
Yglesias and Cole on the front steps of Yglesias’s parents’ house in Maine in 1976, a short time before they began their decade-long writing collaboration.
Yglesias and film producer Paula Weinstein on the set of Fearless, a movie based on his book of the same name. The film, which starred Jeff Bridges, Isabella Rossellini, and Rosie Perez, was adapted for the screen by Yglesias and was hailed by critics upon its release in 1993.
Margaret and Yglesias with their two children, Matthew and Nicholas, shown here on a very happy vacation on Eleuthera, an island in the Bahamas, around Christmas of 1993.
Yglesias and Matthew in an outtake from Jerry Bauer’s 1996 photo shoot with Yglesias before the publication of Dr. Neruda’s Cure for Evil. Matthew had come home from school in the midst of the shoot.
Yglesias and Margaret with their sons Matthew and Nicholas in September of 2003. After Margaret’s two-year battle with bladder cancer, she and Yglesias had to break the news that doctors considered her condition terminal. Margaret died in June of 2004.