Revolutionary Road was an immediate critical success in 1961, and its author, Richard Yates, was set to become one of the great names in literature. Yet the novel failed to find an audience, and by the time of his death Yates was penniless and practically unknown. All of his nine books had fallen out of print. Then something extraordinary happened. An article was published in a small journal in 1999. The Boston Review piece was a spark that rapidly caught fire online. In 2008, a superb film was made by Sam Mendes and all of Yates’s books rushed back into circulation.

Now, Revolutionary Road is widely acknowledged as the ongoing inspiration for the phenomenon that is the Mad Men television series. So what happened between 1961 and 1999? How did one of the masterpieces of the modern era go from extravagant critical praise to abysmal failure to this remarkable resurrection?

The writing was never in question. Yates has the literary craftsmanship and restrained virtuosity of Hemingway. He has Fitzgerald’s depth of feeling for tragedy and sense for zeitgeist. Arguably, Yates had a more finely tuned sense of drama than both of his immediate predecessors. What Yates didn’t have was Hemingway’s ability to swagger through crisis. While Fitzgerald bewitched readers with the fading music of the Jazz Age and a broader loss of innocence, Yates and his characters were swallowed up by the new world that followed Gatsby. It was a turbulent time that destroyed any lingering sentimentality and kept growing until it raged across the world. The Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962 and the ensuing Cold War meant that a searing examination of modern American life was not what anyone wanted to read in a book called Revolutionary Road. By the 90s, an audience had grown for literature that prized truth, however brutal, over the insipid cultural decay and the deepening suburban malaise of their millennial world.

Frank and April Wheeler live on Revolutionary Road. Yates introduces us to the couple just as their life is flourishing in an affluent neighbourhood within an easy commute to New York City. The Wheelers soon join locals attempting to establish a theatre group for the fledgling community. The novel begins just as the Laurel Players are ready for their first curtain call. April Wheeler is the lead actress. The play is a disaster.

What neither Frank nor April is prepared for is the way this community embarrassment sets their world crumbling. For others, it would soon become an anecdote to be laughed about over a barbecque with neighbours. It’s possible that the Wheelers might have entered the procession of sleepwalking lives they now saw all around them, but this disastrous play has jolted them awake. A somnolescent acceptance of a pre-packaged existence will never again be possible for them.

If in the country of the blind the one-eyed man is king, Yates suggests in this novel that in a country of sleepers, those who are awake will live in nightmare. Revolutionary Road is a devastating portrait of modern life. The novel is rightfully called a masterpiece if you believe the central purpose of art is to wake us up. Even a nightmare provides a moment, just after it’s over, where we know we are utterly alive.

A.S. Patric, is a writer and bookseller at Readings St Kilda. His most recent book is