The Day of the Locust - Softcover

Nathanael West is often compared to his close friend F. Scott Fitzgerald, but the dark humor and muscularity of his work offers something distinct to modern readers, exploring as it does the artifice and the dark reality of the human experience in the face of infinite promise - also know as 'the American Dream'.

Novel by Nathanael West about the savagery lurking beneath the Hollywood dream. Published in 1939, it is one of the most striking examples of the "Hollywood novel" in American fiction. Tod Hackett, a set designer, becomes involved in the lives of several individuals who have been warped by their proximity to the artificial world of Hollywood. Hackett's completion of his painting "The Burning of Los Angeles" coincides with the explosion of the other characters' unfulfilled dreams in a conflagration of riot and murder. --The Merriam-Webster Encyclopedia of Literature