The River Road was published by Julian Messner in 1945 and is set in the sugar-plantation country between Baton Rouge and New Orleans — the stretch of River Road lined with antebellum mansions that Keyes knew intimately from her years of living in Louisiana. The novel follows the Doré family through the wartime years, using the disruptions of World War II to expose tensions within the family and within the plantation world they inhabit.
The novel’s strength is in its documentary quality: Keyes researched the sugar industry thoroughly and depicts the annual cycle of planting, growing, and grinding with the same meticulous attention she brought to New Orleans social ritual. The reader learns exactly how sugar is made, how a plantation is managed, how the labor force is organized, and how the economics of sugar production shape every aspect of daily life. This ethnographic precision — Keyes as participant-observer in the worlds she depicts — is her distinctive contribution to popular fiction.
The wartime setting allows Keyes to examine how the old plantation order responds to modern pressures: young men leave for the military, women take on new roles, the racial order is destabilized by wartime labor demands, and the isolation of plantation life is broken by the outside world. The novel is long and deliberate in pace (Keyes’s readers expected and enjoyed this), building its effects through accumulation of detail rather than dramatic incident.
Collecting The River Road
First edition (Julian Messner, New York, 1945): Cloth binding, dust jacket.
Market values:
- First edition in dust jacket: $20–$50
- Without jacket: $5–$10