Shelfology Book Pairing

by Richard Yates

NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FINALIST • Frank and April Wheeler are a bright, beautiful, talented couple in the 1950s whose perfect suburban life is about to crumble in this "moving and absorbing story” (The Atlantic Monthly) from one of the most acclaimed writers of the twentieth century. "The Great Gatsby of my time...one of the best books by a member of my generation." —Kurt Vonnegut, acclaimed author of Slaughterhouse-Five Perhaps Frank and April Wheeler married too young and started a family too early. Maybe Frank's job is dull. And April never saw herself as a housewife. Yet they have always lived on the assumption that greatness is only just around the corner. But now that certainty is about to unravel. With heartbreaking compassion and remorseless clarity, Richard Yates shows how Frank and April mortgage their spiritual birthright, betraying not only each other, but their best selves. In his introduction to this edition, novelist Richard Ford pays homage to the lasting influence and enduring power of Revolutionary Road.

Theodore Dreiser

by Theodore Dreiser

An American TragedyTheodore DreiserAn American Tragedy (1925) is a novel by the American writer Theodore Dreiser.Ambitious but ill-educated, na�ve, and immature Clyde Griffiths is raised by poor and devoutly religious parents to help in their street missionary work. As a young adult, Clyde must, to help support his family, take menial jobs as a soda jerk, then a bellhop at a prestigious Kansas City hotel. There, his more sophisticated colleagues introduce him to bouts of social drinking and sex with some of the hotel's female guests and with prostitutes.Enjoying his new lifestyle, Clyde becomes infatuated with Hortense Briggs, who inveigles Clyde into buying her an expensive jacket. When Clyde learns Hortense desires his colleague Sparser, not himself, as a lover, he becomes jealous. Hortense repeatedly tells Clyde that she loves him while getting him to buy her the jacket (for which they are overcharged by a stereotypically greedy Jewish shopkeeper).Clyde's life changes dramatically when Sparser, driving Clyde, Hortense and other friends back from a secluded rendezvous in the country in a stolen car, hits a little girl and kills her. Fleeing from the police at high speed, Sparser crashes the car. Everyone but Sparser and his partner flee the scene of the crime. Clyde leaves Kansas City, fearing prosecution as an accessory to Sparser's crimes. This pattern of personal irresponsibility and panicked decision-making in Clyde's life recurs in the story, culminating in the central tragedy of the novel.