Revolutionary Road is an American classic and has been made into a film starring Kate Winslet and Leonardo DiCaprio which is due for release in 2009
Hailed as a masterpiece from the moment of its first publication,
Revolutionary Road is the story of Frank and April Wheeler, a bright, beautiful, and talented couple whose empty suburban life is held together by the dream that greatness is only just round the corner. With heartbreaking compassion and clarity, Richard Yates shows how Frank and April mortgage their hopes and ideals, betraying in the end not only each other, but their own best selves.
Author ProfileRichard Yates was born in 1926 in New York and lived in California. His prize-winning stories began to appear in 1953 and his first novel,
Revolutionary Road, was nominated for the National Book Award in 1961. He is the author of eight other works, including the novels
A Good School,
The Easter Parade, and
Disturbing the Peace, and two collections of short stories,
Eleven Kinds of Loneliness and
Liars in Love. He died in 1992.
ReviewsThe literary discovery of the year... It's as brilliantly nuanced as Updike's Rabbit sequence, and as sad as anything by Fitzgerald,Here is more than fine writing; here is what, added to fine writing, makes a book come immediately, intensely and brilliantly alive...a masterpiece,I hand out copies of
Revolutionary Road to anyone who will take them...one of the most moving and exact portraits of suburbia in all of American literature,
The Great Gatsby of my time... One of the best books by a member of my generation,The best novel ever written about the death of the American dream,This is a devastatingly powerful novel; harrowing, like most of Yates’s oeuvre, but fascinating throughout.,The excellence of
Revolutionary Road lies I the integrity with which its author depicts the ~Wheelers’ disintegrated marriage.” “… [the characters reveal themselves] with an intensity that excited the reader’s compassion as well as his interest.
