The Everyman Edition of Richard Yates

Here's an interesting discussion of Richard Yates' literary output, in particular, the sublime Revolutionary Road at Slate:

The film adaptation of Richard Yates' first and most famous novel, Revolutionary Road, starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet, is a remarkably faithful treatment of the book, which—in case you've missed the buzz—is about an attractive young couple who are discontented with 1950s suburban life and come to a bad end. The novel was published in 1961, and almost 50 years later many seem tempted to read Betty Friedan-style discontentment into it, viewing Winslet's character, April Wheeler, as a kind of proto-feminist. It is she, after all, who has the idea to chuck everything and move to Paris while her husband Frank loses his nerve and decides that the "hopeless emptiness" of Eisenhower America isn't so bad.

Yates would have groaned at such an interpretation. Outside the niceties of art, he expressed an almost pathological hatred for what he was apt to call "feminist horseshit," and, indeed, his work has a reputation for its misogynistic edge. Not that his men seem very admirable themselves; behind all the pseudo-intellectual posturing, Frank Wheeler is a cringing mediocrity and (on some level) knows it. He is, in short, a paradigm of the ineffectual Yates-ian male. It is telling, though, that when April's own dreams of being an actress—one of the "golden people," as she puts it—are dashed, she reverts to a misguided faith in her husband, who, she hopes, will "find himself" while she supports him with secretarial work in Paris.

The fact is, Yates was quite capable of exploring the hazards of self-deception from the perspective of either gender. "You know so much about women," Gloria Vanderbilt gushed in a fan letter to Yates—this with particular reference to his fourth novel, The Easter Parade(1976), now available in an omnibus volume from the Everyman Library that also includesRevolutionary Road and the story collection Eleven Kinds of Loneliness. Apart from being (I submit) a masterpiece in its own right, The Easter Parade proves that both feminism and misogyny are beside the point in Yates' best work.