I have high hopes that Sam Mendes, Kate Winslet and Leonardo DiCaprio won't screw up this one. Revolutionary Road was Richard Yates' first novel and, honestly, one of the best novels I've thus far read.
From Yates soon after winning the National Book Award for the novel...
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, as exemplified politically in the Eisenhower administration and the Joe McCarthy witchhunts. Anyway, a great many Americans were deeply disturbed by all that — felt it to be an outright betrayal of our best and bravest revolutionary spirit — and that was the spirit I tried to embody in the character of April Wheeler. I meant the title to suggest that the revolutionary road of 1776 had come to something very much like a dead end in the Fifties.
It's a terrific book and I hope it's a terrific movie. The trailer is here.
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