1962 RevolutionaryRoad
- (Yates, 1962) ⇒ Richard Yates. (1962). “Revolutionary Road.”
Subject Headings: Suburbia, Aloneness.
Notes
Cited By
References
2020
- (Wikipedia, 2020) ⇒ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revolutionary_Road Retrieved:2020-10-31.
- 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. [1]
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. [2]
A film adaptation of the book, starring Leonardo DiCaprio, Kate Winslet, and Kathy Bates, directed by Sam Mendes, and written by Justin Haythe, was released in 2008.... In the October 1999 issue of the Boston Review, Yates was quoted on his central theme: "If my work has a theme, I suspect it is a simple one: that most human beings are inescapably alone, and therein lies their tragedy.” For all their personal hopes and dreams, Frank and April are unable to communicate them to each other; this syndrome is also seen in the other characters, Shep and Milly Campbell, and Mr. and Mrs. Givings. The Wheelers' frustrations and yearnings for something better represent the tattered remnants of the American Dream. ...
- 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. [1]
- ↑ "All-Time 100 Novels", Time, 2005.
- ↑ Henry, DeWitt and Clark, Geoffrey. “An Interview with Richard Yates," Ploughshares, Winter 1972.
Quotes
“if you wanted to do something absolutely honest, something true, it always turned out to be a thing that had to be done alone.” ― Richard Yates, Revolutionary Road
“It's a disease. Nobody thinks or feels or cares any more; nobody gets excited or believes in anything except their own comfortable little God damn mediocrity.”
“No one forgets the truth; they just get better at lying.”
“Being alone has nothing to do with how many people are around.”
“if you don’t try at anything, you can’t fail… it takes back bone to lead the life you want”
“I still had this idea that there was a whole world of marvelous golden people somewhere, as far ahead of me as the seniors at Rye when I was in the sixth grade; people who knew everything instinctively, who made their lives work out the way they wanted without even trying, who never had to make the best of a bad job because it never occured to them to do anything less then perfectly the first time. Sort of heroic super-people, all of them beautiful and witty and calm and kind, and I always imagined that when I did find them I'd suddenly know that I Belonged among them, that I was one of them, that I'd been meant to be one of them all along, and everything in the meantime had been a mistake; and they'd know it too. I'd be like the ugly duckling among the swans.”
“Now you’ve said it. The hopeless emptiness. Hell, plenty of people are on to the emptiness part; out where I used to work, on the Coast, that’s all we ever talked about. We’d sit around talking about emptiness all night. Nobody ever said ‘hopeless,’ though; that’s where we’d chicken out. Because maybe it does take a certain amount of guts to see the emptiness, but it takes a whole hell of a lot more to see the hopelessness. And I guess when you do see the hopelessness, that’s when there’s nothing to do but take off. If you can”
“Are artists and writers the only people entitled to lives of their own?”
“You're painfully alive in a drugged and dying culture.”
“You want to play house, you got to have a job. You want to play very nice house, very sweet house, then you got to have a job you don't like. Great. This is the way ninety-eight-point-nine per cent of the people work things out, so believe me, buddy, you've got nothing to apologize for.”
“The hell with "love" anyway, and with every other phony, time-wasting, half-assed emotion in the world.”
“People did change, and a change could be a bloom as well as a withering...”
“He couldn't even tell whether he was angry or contrite, whether it was forgiveness he wanted or the power to forgive.”
“i mean talk about decadence," he declared, "how decadent can a society get? Look at it this way. This country's probably the psychiatric, psychoanalytical capital of the world. Old Freud himself could never've dreamed up a more devoted bunch of disciples than the population of the United States - isn't that right? Our whole damn culture is geared to it; it's the new religion; it's everybody's intellectual and spiritual sugar-tit. And for all that, look what happens when a man really does blow his top. Call the Troopers, get him out of sight quick, hustle him off and lock him up before he wakes the neighbors. Christ's sake, when it comes to any kind of showdown we're still in the Middle Ages. It's as if everybody'd made this tacit agreement to live in a state of total self-deception. The hell with reality! Let's have a whole bunch of cute little winding roads and cute little houses painted white and pink and baby blue; let's all be good consumers and have a lot of Togetherness and bring our children up in a bath of sentimentality -- and if old reality ever does pop out and say Boo we'll all get busy and pretend it never happened.”
“The whole point of crying was to quit before you cornied it up. The whole point of grief itself was to cut it out while it was still honest, while it still meant something. Because the thing was so easily corrupted, let yourself go and you started embellishing your own sobs.”
“Intelligent, thinking people could take things like this in their stride, just as they took the larger absurdities of deadly dull jobs in the city and deadly dull homes in the suburbs. Economic circumstances might force you to live in this environment, but the important thing was to keep from being contaminated. The important thing, always, was to remember who you were.”
References
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| Author | volume | Date Value | title | type | journal | titleUrl | doi | note | year | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1962 RevolutionaryRoad | Richard Yates | Revolutionary Road | 1962 |