Revolutionary road

Revolutionary Road is the first novel of the American writer Richard Yates, published in 1961 and set in Connecticut in 1955.

Frank Wheeler works in the promotions department of a business machines company, a job he describes to strangers as though it were temporary, and April was an actress before the children came. The novel opens with a failure: April's amateur theatre production, at which Frank's bored irritation is visible to the whole audience. The plan they build afterwards is to sell the house and move to France, which in their minds is less about Paris than about proving that they are not the people their neighbours are. Yates gives the Wheelers their own eloquence and then lets it work against them, and the meetings of the local theatre group, the drinks with the neighbours and the arguments in the car are all recorded with the same precision.

The book was a finalist for the National Book Award in 1962 and was revived decades later as one of the strongest American novels of its period.