The Easter Parade Reading Order

The Easter Parade (1976) by Richard Yates follows two sisters — Sarah and Emily Grimes — across five decades of American life, from their parents' divorce in the 1930s through old age in the 1970s. Neither sister is happy; each is unhappy in different ways. Sarah marries young, into a domestic life that curdles; Emily keeps moving, from affair to affair and job to job, always on the verge of something that doesn't arrive. The Easter Parade is Yates at his most heartbreaking — the novel in which his belief that ordinary American life is organized for disappointment finds its fullest expression. It is often paired with Revolutionary Road as one of his two masterworks.