The Day of the Locust and Miss Lonelyhearts

(Paperback)

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Description

Razor-edged, unforgiving and unmissable satire of Hollywood by Nathanael West In The Day of the Locust a young artist, Tod Hackett, arrives in LA full of dreams. But celebrity and artifice rule and he soon joins the ranks of the disenchanted that drift around the fringes of Hollywood. When he meets Faye Greener, an aspiring actress, he is intoxicated and his desperate passion explodes into rage... Miss Lonelyhearts is a decidedly off-kilter, darkly comic tale set in New York in the early 30s. A nameless man is assigned to produce a newspaper advice column. It was meant to be a joke. But as endless letters from the Desperate, Sick-of-it-All and Disillusioned pile up for Miss Lonelyhearts's attention the joke begins to escape him...

Reviews

As austerity ripples on in this century, the book's combination of escapism and relevance continues to draw me in. The language is so inventive, the characters so brilliantly (often absurdly) captured, and their behaviour so close to pantomime, that it renders the whole a garishly compelling and thought-provoking read -- Elle-Violet Bramley * Guardian *
Black-as-pitch Hollywood farce * The Guardian *
The Day of the Locust has scenes of extraordinary power. Especially I was impressed by the pathological crowd at the premiere, the character and handling of the aspirant actress and the uncanny medieval feeling of some of his Hollywood background set off by those vividly drawn grotesques -- F. Scott Fitzgerald
A talented and somewhat neglected author... wonderfully imaginative and slightly disturbed * Daily Telegraph *
It certainly packs a wallop -- John Dos Passos

Author Bio

Nathanael West (1903-1940) published four novels - The Dream Life of Balso Snell (1931) Miss Lonelyhearts (1933) A Cool Million (1934) The Day of the Locust (1939). West said that 'an artist can afford to be anything but dull'. He died almost unknown in a car crash at the age of thirty-seven. His fans include W.H. Auden, Matt Groening (there is a bookkeeper character in West's 1939 novel The Day Of The Locust called Homer Simpson), F Scott Fitzgerald and Johnny Depp.