Revolutionary Road, The Easter Parade, Eleven Kinds of Loneliness: Introduction [Hardcover]

Three classic works—including the virtuosicRevolutionary Road,soon to be a major motion picture—that exemplify the remarkable gifts of this great American master.

 

Richard Yates’s first novel,Revolutionary Roadis the unforgettable portrait of a marriage built on dreams that tragically never come to fruition. InThe Easter Parade,he tells the story of two sisters whose parents’ divorce overshadows their entire lives. And in the stories inEleven Kinds of Loneliness,we witness men and women striving for better lives amid discouragement and disillusion.

“To me and to many other writers of my generation, the work of Richard Yates came as a liberating force . . . He was one of the most important and influential writers of the second half of the century.” —Robert Stone

“It is Yates’s relentless, unflinching investigation of our secret hearts, and his speaking to us in language as clear and honest and unadorned and unsentimental and uncompromising as his vision, that makes him such a great writer.” —Richard RussoRichard Yates,born in 1926, was praised as the foremost novelist of the postwar “age of anxiety.” He died in 1992.

Richard Priceis the author of seven novels, includingClockers, Freedomland,andLush Life.FROM THE INTRODUCTION BY RICHARD PRICE

As crystalline as he was on the page, in the flesh Richard Yates was a magnificent wreck, a chaotic and wild-hearted presence, a tall but stooped smoke-cloud of a man, Kennedyesque in dress and manner, gaunt and bearded with hung eyes and a cigarette-slaughtered voice, the words barreling out of him in a low breathless rumble as ash flew into salads, into beer mugs, into the laps of others with every gesture, his demeanor invariably lurching between courtly-solicitous and edge-of-bitter cavalier.

I first met Yates in 1974 at the School of the Artsl#