The Day of the Locust and Miss Lonelyhearts

The Day of the Locust and Miss Lonelyhearts

Summary

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

About the author

Nathanael West

Nathanael West was born in 1903. From 1924-1931 he lived in Paris where he wrote The Dream Life of Balso Snell. On his return to New York he became associate editor of the magazine Contact alongside William Carlos Williams. Towards the end of his life he worked on film scripts in Hollywood. He and his wife were tragically killed in a car accident in 1940.
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