Revolutionary Road in Mahopac
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- December
- 15
Everyone is hearing about the new movie “Revolutionary Road” starring two of the most appealing stars of our current time, Kate Winslet and Leonardo DiCaprio. It is based on the 1961 novel (Random House) of the same title by Richard Yates, a grim tale of an unhappy marriage and life in the country focusing on characters Frank and April Wheeler. The appeal of Yates’ writing is how he captured every day people in every day lives. Sometimes gray, but unusually real characters.
But wait, could it be that the country life was based on Putnam County from 40 years ago?
I am not just pulling this out of thin air. Mahopac librarian Patricia Kaufman had the same thought and went to her library’s shelves to pull out a 4-year-old biography of Yates.
According to biographer, Blake Bailey, the novelist was born in Yonkers in 1926 and in the late 1950s bought a home in Mahopac. It is said that perhaps he wrote “Revolutionary Road” while living there. So while the story is indeed set in suburban Connecticut, it might have plenty of overtones of Ma-ho-pac.
Here are some excerpts from Bailey’s book “A Tragic Honesty: The Life and Work of Richard Yates” (Picador/Macmillan, 2004):
“In the summer of 1956 the Yates moved to the rural town of Mahopac in Putnam County, New York, where they lived on a private estate.” The nearly 100-acre property was owned by an aging actress who had founded the Putnam County Playhouse, writes Bailey. On the estate were overgrown gardens, crumbling cottages and a pink stucco cottage “a sort of forlorn charm” that the Yates family lived in.
As well, there was a wellhouse at the end of a long winding dirt road. “With his landlady’s blessing, Yates installed a table, chair, typewriter, and kerosene stove, and wrote most of Revolutionary Road there,” Bailey writes on page 179 of his 688-page biography.
Bailey goes on to describe Yate’s view that Mahopac was “a hick town — little more than a laundromat, bank and ice-cream parlor.”
The ice cream parlor must have been Erickson’s Ice Cream along Route 6 near Mt. Hope Road, where the Mahopac Public Library is now located, notes Kaufman, who runs the Mahopac library. As a nod to that familiar sweet shop, the library has tables and chairs in a first-floor nook where people can bring in light food, read new book choices and have free computer access.
She says she is considering putting together a program about Yates and Revolutionary Road if there is community interest.
And there might be lots to tell about Yates, because biographical data also says he wrote civil rights speeches for Robert Kennedy. Yates died in Alabama in 1992 from complications of emphysema.
The movie will be released next week and is already getting rave comments from the critics. Yates has been described as a chronicler of suburban life like John Cheever and John Updike, but somewhat lesser known. Maybe this will change and people will be reading his other “Young Hearts Crying” (1984), “Disturbing the Peace” (1975), and “Liars in Love” (1981). “Revolutionary Road” was his first novel and he also wrote plenty of short stories.
(Jacket copy from Macmillan.com)
This entry was posted
on Monday, December 15th, 2008 at 6:27 pm by Barbara Nackman.
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Category: Mahopac Public Library, Revolutionary Road, Richard Yates
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