"INTENSELY AND BRILLIANTLY ALIVE": FIRST EDITION OF REVOLUTIONARY ROAD, INSCRIBED IN THE YEAR OF PUBLICATION BY RICHARD YATES

YATES, Richard. Revolutionary Road. Boston and Toronto: Little, Brown / Atlantic Monthly, (1961). Octavo, original half red cloth, original dust jacket. $7800.

First edition of Yates' explosive debut novel, named "the Great Gatsby of our time" by Vonnegut, inscribed in the year of publication, "For N— G— with best wishes Richard Yates Bread Loaf—8/24/61."

Revolutionary Road, Richard Yates' groundbreaking first novel, "creates an indelible portrait of lost promises and mortgaged hopes" in suburban America, a work richly praised for achieving "an intensity that excites the reader's compassion as well as his interest." A National Book Award finalist in 1962, the novel was hailed by Tennessee Williams as "intensely, and brilliantly alive. If more is needed to make a masterpiece in modern American fiction, I am sure I don't know what it is." To writer Richard Ford, Revolutionary Road remains a classic, decades after its first appearance: a work that is brilliant "in its apparent effortlessness, its complete accessibility, its luminous particularity, its deep seriousness toward us human beings—about whom it conjures shocking insights and appraisals. We marvel at its consummate writerliness, its almost simple durability as a purely made thing of words that defeats all attempts at classification. Realism, naturalism, social satire—the standard critical bracketry—all go begging before this splendid book" (New York Times). "First Edition" on copyright page. Yates, who was associated with the Bread Loaf Writers Conference in Vermont in the early 1960s, inscribed this copy in the year of publication to a Minnesota English teacher attending the conference.

Book fine; trace of dampstaining, a couple scratches to rear panel, mild toning to spine of bright near-fine dust jacket.