Books

Classics
Fiction
Historical Fiction

Books like Revolutionary Road

Revolutionary Road

2001, Richard Yates

4/5

Revolutionary Road is American author Richard Yates's debut novel about 1950s suburban life in the East Coast. It was a finalist for the National Book Award in 1962, along with Catch-22 and The Moviegoer. When published by Atlantic-Little, Brown in 1961, it received critical acclaim, and The New York Times reviewed it as "beautifully crafted ... a remarkable and deeply troubling book." In 2005, the novel was chosen by TIME as one of the 100 best English-language novels from 1923 to the present.

When DeWitt Henry and Geoffrey Clark interviewed Yates for the Winter 1972 issue of literary journal Ploughshares, Yates detailed the title's subtext:

I think I meant it more as an indictment of American life in the 1950s. Because during the Fifties there was a general lust for conformity all over this country, by no means only in the suburbs—a kind of blind, desperate clinging to safety and security at any price.

Similar Books

If you like Revolutionary Road, you might also like: Play It As It Lays, The Marriage Plot, and The Shipping News