Richard Yates – America's great forgotten novelist

Revolutionary Road by Richard Yates is a book you should read now as a matter of urgency. This injunction may seem strange. It is, after all, an American novel published almost half a century ago.

It will not encourage you to save the planet nor add to the sum of human happiness - rather the contrary in fact. It is a story of life in the Connecticut suburbs and extremely bleak.

Next month a film version directed by Sam Mendes and starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet will be released in Britain, and not in secret. Already it has been the beneficiary of titanic hype. See it if you wish, but absolutely not before reading the book. That would be a sad mistake.

The film is faithful to the novel (though faithfulness in art, as in marriage, is hardly the most one can hope for) but it will come between you and it and compromise what would likely be one of the reading pleasures of your life.

Thanks to the strange history of Revolutionary Road I can say it with some authority for, until now, it was perhaps the greatest American novel most people had never heard of.

Look, for what it's worth, at Pan Macmillan's list of '50 Best Books Defining The 20th Century' – Revolutionary Road is the only one that you didn't know you should have read. In recent weeks literary pages and glossy magazines have been thick with essays about it, often by a Johnny Come Yately who has tricked up new acquaintanceship to look like old friendship.

Richard Yates’ life was as disturbing as his novels - perenially poor, dead at 66

The playwright David Hare, a long-time devotee, has said: "I hand out copies of Revolutionary Road to anyone who will take them.... one of the most moving and exact portraits of suburbia in all of American literature."

By contrast, Nick Hornby, an honest man who has read a few books in his time, called it "the literary discovery of the year... It's as brilliantly nuanced as John Updike's Rabbit sequence, and as sad as anything by Fitzgerald".

The year in question was 2001, after Vintage had reissued Yates's book with an introduction by the American novelist Richard Ford: "Realism, naturalism, social satire – the standards critical bracketry – all go begging before this splendid book. Revolutionary Road is Revolutionary Road, and to invoke it enacts a sort of cultural-literary secret handshake among its devotees."

Thanks to Ford, I was among those devotees. He told me to read it when I met him in the mid-1980s. Easier said than done in those pre-Amazon days. Though it was in print (just about) it was hard to find even in America. In the two decades since, I have behaved like David Hare, buying up copies wherever I saw them and giving them to friends.

Every single one of them has been staggered and grateful for a book that is both devastating and perfect. The Great Gatsby and Madame Bovary were the novels Yates loved most: Revolutionary Road in its power, subtlety and perfection, can sit alongside both of them.

The life of Richard Yates was as disturbing as his novels - a nightmare childhood, physically gauche, alcoholic, manic depressive, perennially poor, 80-a-day smoker, emphysema, dead at 66. He was 35 when Revolutionary Road was published in 1961. It was his first novel and his masterpiece.

Before that he had written short stories with almost no commercial success though he is beyond question one of the 20th century's supreme short story writers. The New Yorker, with exquisite bad taste, rejected several Yates stories and gave Revolutionary Road a shabby critical reception; Dorothy Parker, by contrast, writing in Esquire called it: "A treasure, a jewel... Mr Yates's eyes and ears are gifts from heaven."

In 1962 it was shortlisted for the National Book Award but it didn't win. As the American writer Dan Wakefield, a friend of Yates, says, "It was a 'Rosebud' moment for Dick: if he'd won his whole life would have been different." As it was, while he wrote his novels, he had to make a living teaching writing, though he was far from sure that writing could be taught.

Among his students in 1974 was Richard Price, now a vastly successful novelist and screenplay writer. "He was a nurturer of grudges. He was bitter," Price remembers, "he had every right to be bitter. He was really bitter. At 24, I had just published my first novel The Wanderers, making me the literary dog of the month, and when he came to my name on the roll call he added: 'Oh, so you're the billion dollar bonus baby,' in a voice that turned my spine to chalk."

Among writers of his generation and after, Yates has always been recognised as a master: Kurt Vonnegut, William Styron, Tennessee Williams queued up to pay homage. He was a "writer's writer" which he hated (it's a synonym for pauper).

The novelist Stewart O'Nan wrote a lengthy article about Revolutionary Road in the Boston Review in 1999 which some earmark as the launch of Yates's renaissance. Vintage republished the book in the US the following year.

It is either a savage irony or simply karma that Yates had to wait for success until a decade after his death. The new edition of Revolutionary Road - "now a major motion picture" - has a photograph of Kate and Leonardo on the cover. Read the book.'Revolutionary Road' is available in a Vintage paperback.
The film is released in the UK on January 30. ·