Cold Spring Harbor »

A native New Yorker, Richard Yates was born in 1926; his first novel, Revolutionary Road, was a finalist for the National Book Award (in the same year as The Moviegoer and Catch-22). Much admired by peers, he was known during his lifetime as the foremost fiction writer of the post-war "age of anxiety." He published his last novel in 1986, and died in 1992.

In this classic novel Richard Yates, hailed as a preeminent chronicler of the American condition and author of the acclaimed Revolutionary Road, weaves a masterful, unflinching tale of two families brought together by chance, desperation, and desire.

Evan Shepard was born with good looks, bad luck, and a love for the open ro But it was on one such drive, with his father from rural Long Island into lower Manhattan, that Evan’s life would be changed forever. When their car breaks down on a Greenwich Village street, Evan’s father presses a random doorbell, looking for a telephone. Within hours, two families—sharing equally complex and addled histories—will come together. There will be flirtation. There will be a marriage. There will be a child, a new home… But as Evan moves further into the uncharted land of manhood, as the women and men around him come into focus, he faces roads not taken and a journey not made—in Richard Yates’ haunting exploration of human restlessness, family secrets, and a future shaped by them both.

Publishers Weekly

The central ``character'' and enveloping presence in this novel is a ``whole rotten little town'' on the north shore of Long Island. In no sense the Cold Spring Harbor of the tourists and summer people, it is the dismal home base where the characters live out their disappointments and aborted hopes in the period before and after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. Evan Shepherd, a lout as boy and man, a machinist in love with cars, is the son of a retired Army officer reduced to the role of valet to his neurasthenic, alcoholic second wife, Rachel, daughter of a garrulous, socially pretentious alcoholic madwoman. Rachel's brother Phil, a 16-year-old prep-school student, is the only character who might conceivably develop into a substantial person. The lives portrayed are bleak, trivial, thwarted, vapid, but they are made memorable against all odds by Yates's high virtue as a writer. The power demonstrated in his earlier work (A Good School; The Easter Parade is reconfirmed here; he can bring a scene, a subject, a character to sharply detailed focus through an unswerving fidelity to the grim truths of existence, related in a clear and ringing prose. (September 12)