“Set in the Connecticut suburbs of 1955, Revolutionary Road portrays the essential, continuing, now exacerbated American dilemma: How a young person might well live in America without conforming to the tedium of upward mobility and suburban family life. Nothing I have ever been told could have prepared me for this book's brilliance.”
— Richard Howorth, Square Books, Oxford, MS
In the hopeful 1950s, Frank and April Wheeler appear to be a model couple: bright, beautiful, talented, with two young children and a starter home in the suburbs. Perhaps they married too young and started a family too early. Maybe Frank's job is dull. And April never saw herself as a housewife. Yet they have always lived on the assumption that greatness is only just around the corner. But now that certainty is about to crumble.
With heartbreaking compassion and remorseless clarity, Richard Yates shows how Frank and April mortgage their spiritual birthright, betraying not only each other, but their best selves.
“Primary and forceful. . . . Revolutionary Road looks straight at us . . . and invites us to pay attention, have a care, take heed, and live life as if it mattered what we do.”
—Richard Ford
“A powerful treatment of a characteristically American theme…. A moving and absorbing story.”
—The Atlantic Monthly
“The great Gatsby of my time.”
—Kurt Vonnegut
“Yates allows his characters to reveal themselves-- which they do with an intensity that excites the reader's compassion [and] interest.”
—The New York Times