For most of his career, Richard Yates seemed always on the brink of gaining the fame he so richly deserved. His first novel, Revolutionary Road (1961), was immediately hailed as a masterpiece of realism, a definitive portrait of postwar suburban malaise. William Styron called it "a deft, beautiful novel that deserves to be a classic," and Tennessee Williams said "if more is needed to make a masterpiece in modern American fiction, I am sure I don't know what it is." The novel was nominated for a National Book Award and sold ten thousand copies in hardback, eminently respectable for a literary first novel, all the more so for a novel that many found almost unbearably depressing. "You see yourself here," wrote Fred Chappell in 1971. "When you have an argument with your wife, or with someone who is a bit less articulate than you . . . you begin to hear Frank Wheeler...