The Novels of Nathanael West

The Novels of Nathanael West includes four classic novels by the American writer and satirist:


    The Dream Life of Balso Snell (1931)

    Miss Lonelyhearts (1933)

    A Cool Million (1934)

    The Day of the Locust (1939)


Miss Lonelyhearts is widely regarded as West's masterpiece. The Day of the Locust (1939) still stands as one of the best novels written about the early years of Hollywood. It is often compared to F. Scott Fitzgerald's unfinished novel, The Last Tycoon, written at about the same time and also set in Hollywood. Day of the Locust was ultimately made into a film which came out in 1975 starring Donald Sutherland and Karen Black. Likewise Miss Lonelyhearts (1933) saw production in film (1933, 1958, 1983), stage (1957), and operatic (2006) versions. 


If one were to draw a family tree of authors who employed "black humor" in their works of fiction, West could be seen as the offspring of Gogol and Poe, and the progenitor of Saul Bellow, Vladimir Nabokov, and Martin Amis (whose use of movingly inarticulate e-mails in Yellow Dog is a 21st-century echo of the letters to Miss Lonelyhearts). A more direct and pronounced influence has been traced from West's work to that of his near-contemporary, Flannery O'Connor.


Expertly formatted with a linked table of contents. Look for more classic books from Green Light. 

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