Nathanael West Books In Order

Novels

The Dream Life of Balso Snell (1931)
Miss Lonelyhearts (1933)
A Cool Million (1934)
The Day of the Locust (1939)

Omnibus

Day of the Locust / Dream Life of Balso Snell (1963)
Cool Million / Dream Life of Balso Snell (1969)
Miss Lonelyhearts / Day of the Locust (1975)
The Collected Works of Nathanael West (1975)

Collections

The Complete Works (1957)
Novels and Other Writings (1997)

Novels Book Covers

Omnibus Book Covers

Collections Book Covers

Nathanael West Books Overview

The Dream Life of Balso Snell

In this 1931 Dada inspired work, the first novel of the author of Miss Lonelyhearts and The Day of the Locust, the eponymous anti hero stumbles across the Trojan Horse and climbs inside. His journey takes him through a mental jungle, offering an unforgettable look at the dark side of the American dream.

Miss Lonelyhearts

Set in New York during the Great Depression, Miss Lonelyhearts concerns a nameless man assigned to produce a newspaper advice column but as time pas*ses he begins to break under the endless misery of those who write in, begging him for advice. Unable to find answers, and with his shaky Christianity ridiculed to razor edged shards by his poisonous editor, he tumbles into alcoholism and a madness fueled by his own spiritual emptiness.

A Cool Million

A Cool Million: The Dismantling of Lemuel Pitkin is Nathanael West’s third novel, published in 1934. It is a brutal satire of eternal optimism.A Cool Million, as its subtitle suggests, presents the dismantling of Lemuel Pitkin, piece by piece. As a satire of the Horatio Alger myth of success, the novel is evocative of Voltaire’s Candide, which satirized the philosophical optimism of Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz and Alexander Pope. Pitkin is a typical Schlemiel , stumbling from one situation to the next; he gets robbed, cheated, unjustly arrested, frequently beaten and exploited. In a parallel plot Betty Prail, Pitkin’s love interest, is raped, abused, and sold into prostitution. Over the course of the novel Pitkin manages to lose an eye, his teeth, his thumb, his scalp and his leg, but nevertheless retains his optimism and gullibility to the inevitably bitter end.

The Day of the Locust

Tod Hackett is a brilliant young artist and a man in danger of losing his heart. Brought to an LA studio as a set designer, he is soon caught up in a fantasy world where the cult of celebrity rules. But when he becomes besotted by the beautiful Faye, an aspiring actress and occasional call girl, his dream rapidly becomes a nightmare. For, with little in the way of looks and no money to buy her time, Tod’s desperate passion can only lead to frustration, disillusionment and rage…
a selection from: CHAPTER 1: Around quitting time, Tod Hackett heard a great din on the road outside his office. The groan of leather mingled with the jangle of iron and over all beat the tattoo of a thousand hooves. He hurried to the window. An army of cavalry and foot was passing. It moved like a mob; its lines broken, as though fleeing from some terrible defeat. The dolmans of the hussars, the heavy shakos of the guards, Hanoverian light horse, with their fiat leather caps and flowing red plumes, were all jumbled together in bobbing disorder. Behind the cavalry came the infantry, a wild sea of waving sabretaches, sloped muskets, crossed shoulder belts and swinging cartridge boxes.. Tod recognized the scarlet infantry of England with their white shoulder pads, the black infantry of the Duke of Brunswick, the French grenadiers with their enormous white gaiters, the Scotch with bare knees under plaid skirts. While he watched, a little fat man, wearing a cork sun helmet, polo shirt and knickers, darted around the corner of the building in pursuit of the army. ‘Stage Nine you bast*ards Stage Nine!’ he screamed through a small megaphone. The cavalry put spur to their horses and the infantry broke into a dogtrot. The little man in the cork hat ran after them, shaking his fist and cursing. Tod watched until they had disappeared behind half a Mississippi steamboat, then put away his pencils and drawing board, and left the office. On the sidewalk outside the studio he stood for a moment trying to decide whether to walk home or take a streetcar. He had been in Hollywood less than three months and still found it a very exciting place, but he was lazy and didn’t like to walk. He decided to take the streetcar as far as Vine Street and walk the rest of the way. A talent scout for National Films had brought Tod to the Coast after seeing some of his drawings in an exhibit of undergraduate work at the Yale School of Fine Arts. He had been hired by telegram. If the scout had met Tod, he probably wouldn’t have sent him to Hollywood to learn set and costume designing. His large, sprawling body, his slow blue eyes and sloppy grin made him seem completely without talent, almost doltish in fact. Yes, despite his appearance, he was really a very complicated young man with a whole set of personalities, one inside the other like a nest of Chinese boxes. And ‘The Burning of Los Angeles,’ a picture he was soon to paint, definitely proved he had talent. He left the car at Vine Street. As he walked along, he examined the evening crowd. A great many of the people wore sports clothes which were not really sports clothes. Their sweaters, knickers, slacks, blue flannel jackets with brass buttons were fancy dress. The fat lady in the yachting cap was going shopping, not boating; the man in the Norfolk jacket and Tyrolean hat was returning, not from a mountain, but an insurance office; and the girl in slacks and sneaks with a bandanna around her head had just left a switchboard, not a tennis court.

Day of the Locust / Dream Life of Balso Snell

Cool Million / Dream Life of Balso Snell

Nathanael West was only thirty seven when he died in 1940, but his depictions of the sometimes comic, sometimes horrifying aspects of the American scene rival those of William Faulkner and Flannery O’Connor. A Cool Million, written in 1934, is a satiric Horatio Alger story set in the midst of the Depression. The Dream Life of Balso Snell 1931 was described by one critic as ‘a fantasy about some rather scatological adventures of the hero in the innards of the Trojan horse.’

Miss Lonelyhearts / Day of the Locust

‘A primer for Big Bad City disillusionment, unsparing in its portrayal of New York’s debilitating entropy.’ The Village Voice. With a new introduction by Jonathan Lethem. First published in 1933, Miss Lonelyhearts remains one of the most shocking works of 20th century American literature, as unnerving as a glob of black bile vomited up at a church social: empty, blasphemous, and horrific. Set in New York during the Depression and probably West’s most powerful work, Miss Lonelyhearts concerns a nameless man assigned to produce a newspaper advice column but as time pas*ses he begins to break under the endless misery of those who write in, begging him for advice. Unable to find answers, and with his shaky Christianity ridiculed to razor edged shards by his poisonous editor, he tumbles into alcoholism and a madness fueled by his own spiritual emptiness. During his years in Hollywood West wrote The Day of the Locust, a study of the fragility of illusion. Many critics consider it with F. Scott Fitzgerald’s unfinished masterpiece The Last Tycoon 1941 among the best novels written about Hollywood. Set in Hollywood during the Depression, the narrator, Tod Hackett, comes to California in the hope of a career as a painter for movie backdrops but soon joins the disenchanted second rate actors, technicians, laborers and other characters living on the fringes of the movie industry. Tod tries to seduce Faye Greener; she is seventeen. Her protector is an old man named Homer Simpson. Tod finds work on a film called prophetically The Burning of Los Angeles, and the dark comic tale ends in an apocalyptic mob riot outside a Hollywood premiere, as the system runs out of control.

The Collected Works of Nathanael West

Normal 0 false false false EN US X NONE X NONE / Style Definitions / table. MsoNormalTable mso style name:’Table Normal’; mso tstyle rowband size:0; mso tstyle colband size:0; mso style noshow:yes; mso style priority:99; mso style qformat:yes; mso style parent:”; mso padding alt:0in 5. 4pt 0in 5. 4pt; mso para margin top:0in; mso para margin right:0in; mso para margin bottom:10. 0pt; mso para margin left:0in; line height:115 ; mso pagination:widow orphan; font size:11. 0pt; font family:’Calibri’,’sans serif’; mso ascii font family:Calibri; mso ascii theme font:minor latin; mso fareast font family:’Times New Roman’; mso fareast theme font:minor fareast; mso hansi font family:Calibri; mso hansi theme font:minor latin; With an Introduction and Notes by Henry Claridge, Senior Lecturer, School of English, University of Kent at Canterbury. The four novels gathered here constitute the complete longer works of one the most brilliant and original American writers. West’s vision of American modernity is terrifyingly comical and diagnoses the tawdriness and meretriciousness of much of American popular culture. His greatest work, Miss Lonelyhearts, which begins this collection, is unique in modern literature. It describes New York in the early years of the Great Depression through the point of view of an agony aunt who corresponds with his suffering readers in the guise of Miss Lonelyhearts: Are you in trouble? Do you need advice? . A Cool Million is, as its subtitle suggests, the dismantling of a myth, here a caustic satire of the rags to riches story. West s final novel, The Day of the Locust, is a comic, yet apocalyptic account of the fantasies of 1930s Hollywood. This volume concludes with West s parodic and surreal first venture into fiction, The Dream Life of Balso Snell. Henry Claridge s introduction to this new edition of West s fictional writings contextualises his work in the United States of the Great Depression, in his evocation of 1930s Hollywood where he worked as a writer of screenplays, and in the larger context of his Eastern European Jewish background, and, particularly, his reading of Dostoyesvky. The text comes with extensive annotations, a note on the textual history of West s writings, and a guide to further reading for both the student and the general reader.

The Complete Works

Novels and Other Writings

The first comprehensive, authoritative edition of the work of America’s prince of black humor and social satire includes his most famous novels of the thirties, along with his poetry, essays, plays, film scripts, and letters.’