Where to Start with Richard Yates: A Reading Guide
Where to start with Richard Yates — whether to begin with Revolutionary Road or The Easter Parade. A complete reading guide to the American novelist.
Richard Yates (1926–1992) was the American novelist and short-story writer whose debut Revolutionary Road (1961) — nominated for the National Book Award but passed over for commercial success — is now considered one of the great American novels of the twentieth century: a study of self-deception, suburban entrapment, and thwarted potential so precise and devastating that it remains the definitive fictional account of 1950s American suburban life. Yates lived most of his adult life in poverty and alcoholism; his work was largely out of print at his death and has been substantially rediscovered since 2000.
Where to Start: Revolutionary Road (1961)
The essential Yates — and one of the most beautifully written, quietly devastating novels in American fiction. Frank and April Wheeler are exactly the kind of people who consider themselves too good for the life they’re living. They met in the late 1940s, both with vague but genuine aspirations to live differently — more intensely, more authentically, more consciously — than the suburban conformists around them. By the early 1950s, they are living in a Connecticut suburb identical to the ones they despise.
April has the idea of moving to Paris. Frank will write; April will work; they will finally be the people they have always believed they are. Their neighbours — particularly the conventional Campbells next door — represent everything they are trying to escape. When April presents the plan, Frank is simultaneously excited and terrified: the plan would require him to actually become the person he claims to be.
Yates’s technique is a form of literary devastation: he shows, with excruciating precision, the gap between how Frank and April think of themselves and what they actually do. Their contempt for mediocrity is itself mediocre; their claim to specialness is a defence against acknowledging failure; their marriage is sustained by mutual self-deception that Frank is unwilling and April is unable to maintain.
The novel contains no villains. Everyone is simply doing the best they can within the constraints of who they are — and who they are is not sufficient for the lives they imagined.
The Easter Parade (1976)
Yates’s second major novel — two sisters’ lives traced from the 1930s to the 1970s, both making choices that lead to quiet disaster. More diffuse than Revolutionary Road but equally precise and equally dark. Yates considered it his best novel.
Reading Richard Yates
Begin with Revolutionary Road — it is his most concentrated and immediately devastating work. Read The Easter Parade after for a different scope: two lives instead of one marriage, across decades rather than years.
For the full Richard Yates bibliography, reviews, and biography, visit the Richard Yates author page on Editors Reads.
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Frequently Asked Questions
Where should I start with Richard Yates?
Revolutionary Road (1961) is the essential starting point — Yates's debut novel about Frank and April Wheeler, a couple in 1950s suburban Connecticut who believe themselves superior to the conformist world around them and whose attempt to escape to Paris ends in destruction. One of the great American novels about self-deception, thwarted ambition, and the costs of a life unlived. The Easter Parade is his second most important novel.
What is Revolutionary Road about?
Revolutionary Road follows Frank and April Wheeler, a young couple who met in the 1940s, both full of vague but intense aspirations to live authentically rather than conventionally. By their early thirties, they are living in a Connecticut suburb, Frank commuting to a meaningless city job, April managing the home and their two children. Their plan to move to Paris — to reset and find the life they imagined — becomes the novel's central drama, and its unravelling exposes the gap between how they understand themselves and what they actually are.
What is The Easter Parade about?
The Easter Parade (1976) follows two sisters — Emily and Sarah Grimes — from their 1930s childhood through their parallel but divergent adult lives: Sarah into a disastrous marriage, Emily into a series of relationships and careers that never quite cohere. The novel traces their lives across decades with Yates's characteristic precision and lack of consolation. Less immediately gripping than Revolutionary Road but equally dark; Yates called it his best novel.
Why was Richard Yates neglected for so long?
Yates published consistently from 1961 to 1992 but was largely out of print at his death; he was considered a writers' writer — admired by peers including Kurt Vonnegut, who called Revolutionary Road 'the Great Gatsby of my time,' but not commercially successful. He was rediscovered after Richard Russo's 1999 introduction to a reissue and more thoroughly after the 2008 Sam Mendes film adaptation of Revolutionary Road (starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet). He is now widely considered one of the finest American fiction writers of the twentieth century.
