With the film version of Richard Yates's first novel Revolutionary Road released in December 2008 in the US, and in January 2009 throughout the rest of the world, we have been given a much-needed incentive to look at this author's work in more detail. This article argues that Yates had an ambivalent relationship with Hollywood, a relationship that mirrored in many ways F Scott Fitzgerald's relationship to the machinery of Hollywood, to its power, to what it offered for the writer and, in the end, to its false promises. Largely basing his views on his early experience with cinema in the 1930s, Yates examines the effect of Hollywood in the 1950s on the ordinary lives of American citizens, and shows how it affected not just their material concerns, but also the way they behaved.Revolutionary Road is now, at last, receiving something like the attention it has always deserved. However, in addition to looking at Yates's first novel, this paper also looks atThe Easter Parade and his short story "Saying Goodbye to Sally," suggesting that they too deserve our attention and critical acclaim.

How Richard Yates related to Hollywood demands more than just a few cursory phrases; it was a complicated relationship and reflected the complexity of the role Hollywood played in relation to America itself. It is important to note that the era in which Richard Yates grew up and first experienced the power of the movies was the 1930s. It was this era of film making that most closely influenced his views on both the power and significance of Hollywood, and on the kind of social realities that it disseminated. Later in life, he was dismissive of cinematic narratives; in an essay written about himself in 1981, he said, "I almost never go to a movie now, and have been known to explain loftily, if not quite at the top of my lungs, that this is because movies are for children" (Yates, 1981a). However, as a youth—a youth who was not a particularly keen reader—cinema was his main source of entertainment. Yates's mother, divorced, on her own and averse to housework, used to take her two young children, when they were out of school, to watch films a great deal in order to pass the time:

The three of them were together constantly, and their principal way of killing time was going to the movies … he often startled friends with detailed and rather emotional accounts of the movies he'd seen in the thirties (Bailey, 2003, p. 23).

American Literature Journal, Emotional Accounts, Societal Debates, Metaphorical Criticism, Suburban Environment, Marital Harmony, Bargaining Tool, Enormous Blow, Faithful Adaptation, Conservative Tradition, Anti-Semitic Groups, Metaphorical Description.