The Day of the Locust and Miss Lonelyhearts (Vintage Classics)

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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.

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NATHANAEL WEST (1903-1940) published four novels -- The Dream Life of Balso Snell (1931), Miss Lonelyhearts (1933), A Cool Million (1934), and 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.