The Easter Parade was published by Delacorte Press in 1976 and is, by common critical consensus, Richard Yates’s second-best novel — the one that comes closest to Revolutionary Road in its devastating precision and emotional power. Its opening sentence is one of the most famous in postwar American fiction: “Neither of the Grimes sisters would have a happy life, and looking back it always seemed that the trouble began with their parents’ divorce.”
The Novel
The novel follows Emily and Sarah Grimes from the 1930s through the 1970s. Sarah, the elder sister, makes the conventional choice: she marries Tony Wilson, a stolid, increasingly violent man, and settles into suburban motherhood. Emily, the younger, rejects domesticity for education, career, and a series of relationships with men who invariably disappoint her.
Yates’s genius is to deny both paths any redemption. Sarah’s marriage becomes a prison of alcoholism and abuse. Emily’s independence becomes a different kind of prison — of loneliness, meaningless affairs, and the slow recognition that freedom without connection is just another form of emptiness. The novel refuses the feminist narrative that independence equals liberation, just as it refuses the conservative narrative that marriage equals fulfillment. Both stories end badly, because in Yates’s vision of American life, there is no arrangement of circumstances that can protect people from their own limitations and the world’s indifference.
Structure and Time
The novel covers roughly forty years in fewer than 230 pages — an extraordinary compression that gives individual scenes enormous weight. Yates moves through decades in a paragraph, then slows to record a single conversation with microscopic exactness. The effect is of a life experienced at two speeds simultaneously: the long view in which everything blurs together, and the close-up in which every wrong word and missed opportunity is preserved in amber.
The structure mirrors the sisters’ lives: episodic, disconnected, with large gaps where nothing much happens and brief intense periods where everything changes. This is how most lives actually unfold — not as coherent narratives but as a series of scenes separated by stretches of routine — and Yates captures it with devastating accuracy.
The Problem of the Women’s Novel
The Easter Parade is unusual in Yates’s work for its female protagonists. His other novels focus almost exclusively on men — men who drink too much, men who can’t write the book they want to write, men whose marriages are failing. The Easter Parade demonstrates that Yates understood women’s lives with the same forensic clarity he brought to men’s — perhaps more, because the constraints on Emily and Sarah are more visible and more explicit than those on Yates’s male characters.
The novel belongs to a tradition of fiction about women’s limited choices — alongside Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth, Jean Rhys’s Good Morning, Midnight, and Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar. But Yates is less interested in social critique than in the simple, terrible fact that most people’s lives do not work out as they hoped, regardless of the choices they make.
Publication History
The first edition was published by Delacorte Press/Seymour Lawrence, New York, in 1976. First printings are identified by:
- Delacorte/Seymour Lawrence imprint on title page
- “First printing” stated or number line present
- Price on dust jacket front flap
- Cloth binding with jacket
The novel received excellent reviews but modest sales — by 1976, Yates was already sliding toward the obscurity that would characterize his final decades.
Collecting The Easter Parade
First edition (Delacorte/Seymour Lawrence, 1976): Fine copies in dust jacket bring $200–$600. The novel’s reputation has grown significantly since Yates’s rediscovery, and prices have increased accordingly.
Signed copies are rare. Yates was not widely sought for signings during the 1970s. Authenticated signed copies bring $800–$2,500.
UK first edition: Quite scarce, $150–$400.
The Easter Parade is the second most valuable Yates title after Revolutionary Road and benefits from the same rediscovery momentum. Its reputation among writers — Richard Ford, Ann Beattie, Andre Dubus, and others have cited it as a masterpiece — ensures continued collector interest.