Dismembering the American Dream

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