Richard Yates – America's great forgotten novelist

Revolutionary Road by Richard Yates is a book you should read now as a matter of urgency. This injunction may seem strange. It is, after all, an American novel published almost half a century ago.

It will not encourage you to save the planet nor add to the sum of human happiness - rather the contrary in fact. It is a story of life in the Connecticut suburbs and extremely bleak.

Next month a film version directed by Sam Mendes and starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet will be released in Britain, and not in secret. Already it has been the beneficiary of titanic hype. See it if you wish, but absolutely not before reading the book. That would be a sad mistake.

The film is faithful to the novel (though faithfulness in art, as in marriage, is hardly the most one can hope for) but it will come between you and it and compromise what would likely be one of the reading pleasures of your life.

Thanks to the strange history of Revolutionary Road I can say it with some authority for, until now, it was perhaps the greatest American novel most people had never heard of.

Look, for what it's worth, at Pan Macmillan's list of '50 Best Books Defining The 20th Century' – Revolutionary Road is the only one that you didn't know you should have read. In recent weeks literary pages and glossy magazines have been thick with essays about it, often by a Johnny Come Yately who has tricked up new acquaintanceship to look like old friendship.

Richard Yates’ life was as disturbing as his novels - perenially poor, dead at 66

The playwright David Hare, a long-time devotee, has said: "I hand out copies of Revolutionary Road to anyone who will take them.... one of the most moving and exact portraits of suburbia in all of American literature."

By contrast, Nick Hornby, an honest man who has read a few books in his time, called it "the literary discovery of the year... It's as brilliantly nuanced as John Updike's Rabbit sequence, and as sad as anything by Fitzgerald".

The year in question was 2001, after Vintage had reissued Yates's book with an introduction by the American novelist Richard Ford: "Realism, naturalism, social satire – the standards critical bracketry – all go begging before this splendid book. Revolutionary Road is Revolutionary Road, and to invoke it enacts a sort of cultural-literary secret handshake among its devotees."

Thanks to Ford, I was among those devotees. He told me to read it when I met him in the mid-1980s. Easier said than done in those pre-Amazon days. Though it was in print (just about) it was hard to