Dismembering the American Dream: The Life and Fiction of Richard Yates

Winner of the Elizabeth Agee Prize in American Literature

Since his death in Alabama in 1992, the work of American writer Richard Yates has enjoyed a renaissance, culminating in director Sam Mendes’s adaption of the novel Revolutionary Road (starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet). Dismembering the American Dream is the first book-length critical study of Yates’s fiction.

Kate Charlton-Jones argues that to read Yates’s tales of disordered lives is to uncover not misery, though the li...