Recommendations
Books Like The Easter Parade
Best books to read after The Easter Parade by Richard Yates
Richard Yates's The Easter Parade is a heartbreaking account of two sisters across five decades of American life — neither of them happy, neither able to explain why. These recommendations extend the experience through Yates's other novels and through literary fiction that shares his clear-eyed account of American disappointment.
- 1Buy
Revolutionary Road
by Richard Yates
Yates's debut novel — often listed alongside The Easter Parade as his two masterworks; a couple in Connecticut suburbia whose aspirations are destroyed by their circumstances; more plot-driven than The Easter Parade but equally devastating.
- 2Buy
Disturbing the Peace
by Richard Yates
Yates's third novel — a New York advertising man whose life unravels; shares The Easter Parade's interest in the quietly catastrophic lives of people who wanted more than they got.
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The Women's Room
by Marilyn French
French's 1977 feminist novel about women in 1950s Massachusetts and 1960s Harvard — the feminist counterpart to The Easter Parade's account of what American life in the postwar decades offered women who were not permitted to want more.
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A Tree Grows in Brooklyn
by Betty Smith
A girl growing up in Brooklyn at the turn of the twentieth century — the earlier version of the female American life Yates examines: a young woman who wants to read and be someone in a world organized to prevent it.
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The Bell Jar
by Sylvia Plath
Esther Greenwood's breakdown — the most direct literary parallel to The Easter Parade's account of a young American woman who cannot make what the world offers her feel like enough.
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Mrs. Bridge
by Evan S. Connell
A wealthy Kansas City woman whose life is organized around social convention and who never quite becomes real to herself — the same territory as The Easter Parade, in a more elliptical, episodic form.
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An Unmarried Woman
by Sue Miller
A Boston woman navigating divorce and its aftermath — the most compassionate contemporary parallel to The Easter Parade's account of women who build lives and find them unsatisfying.
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Age of Grief
by Jane Smiley
Smiley's novella about a dentist who discovers his wife is in love with another man and decides to wait for it to end — organized around the same quiet defeat of domestic aspiration that structures The Easter Parade.
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