Customer Reviews (1)

hollywood mythology
Tom Dardis' "Some Time In The Sun" surprisingly takes on some myths about the fate of some great writers who wound up in hollywood. Dardis makes it clear that he is a proponent of film as an art, and suggests that the movies influenced in some ways the writers who are considered. The myth is one of a lurid money obsessed hollywood being the bottom of the barrel, and its contribution to the destruction of the literary artists who got entangled with it. Dardis demonstrates that the writers in question were motivated by money, that is important, given that most of the time covered was during the Great Depression. The book considers realistically the writers' need to make a living and the movie industry which could pay them for writing. Filled with fascinating detail, Fitzgerald's attempt to produce a great screenplay (he never did), Faulkner's relation to Howard Hawkes, and West's toiling in the skuzzy part of Hollywood, saving his best for "Day of The Locust." The value of this book, I think, is to overturn the literary mythology that condemns the Hollywood film and the film industry, not uncritically or unrealistically, quite the contrary, but to throw light on the relation of these literary artists to that industry. ... Read more

Product Description
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."Amazon.com Review
In 1940, when an automobile accident prematurely claimedNathanael West's life, he was a relatively obscure writer, the authorof only four short novels. West's reputation has grown considerablysince then and he is now considered one of the 20th century's majorauthors. This superb volume, edited by Sacvan Bercovitch, compiles allof West's novels and a great number of other documents, includingstories, plays, and letters. Novels and Other Writings is themost complete West now available in a single volume. Film buffs willbe particularly fascinated by Miss Lonelyhearts, which servedas the basis for two intriguing movies and The Day of theLocust, West's final novel, which many consider to be the mostwithering attack on Hollywood ever written. Among the papers includedin this collection are a never-filmed screenplay, Before theFact, and a screen treatment of West's novel A CoolMillion. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (8)

LA Burning?
There is a problem with the publication of material by a talented writer who died in an accident before he could fully grow out of his pupa stage.
Allegedly, West wrote 4 short novels before he died in a car crash. Well, in my reckoning there were 3 and a half. The Dream Life of Balso Snell can't seriously be counted as a novella or long story or novelette, it is i.m.o. an experimental text withou interest.

Miss Lonelyhearts is a lovely short novel that I like a lot and that I have reviewed with 5 stars separately.

A Cool Million is a bore of a parody. Most parodies are bores. This is making fun of Horatio Alger, but come on, is there anybody out there who can still laugh about Horatio Alger? (Sorry, in case that you believe in THE AMERICAN DREAM, you may want to stop reading here.) The positivest idea that came to my mind when I tried to read A Cool Million was: hey, this is like Candide making fun of The Best of All Worlds. Indeed, but after Voltaire did that brillantly some centuries go, do we need to re-run it? I don't think so.

The Day of the Locust starts brillantly too: LA Burning! A young painter from the East Coast has let himself be hired to Hollywood as a screen or set designer, and apart from being overwhelmed by a brainless wood-be starlet (a very human touch, no criticism here), who makes her real career as a well paid service industry employee, he sees the place, its people, its buildings, like a painter, and it is atrocious. The novel starts with verve and I was prepared to love it, but then I dropped out: the man West had not learned to keep up speed. There are several chapters in this Hollywood Odyssee, which are bordering on the slow and boring. In other words, I would have given the separate novel not more than 4 stars.
No doubt he was a very talented writer... Why did he need to have that accident?

I just flipped through the second half of the book, which has short texts, letters and such, and I thought: is this oeuvre really big enough to merit the inclusion in the LoA?
I admit that I may be wrong with my doubts... Tell me!

Definitive West
I had Nathanael West's novels from college, and was looking for a copy of Western Union Boy, among other writings. This volume was resonably priced, contained everything I was looking for, and arrived early in pristine condition.

The man who burned Los Angeles
The quartet of piquant short novels Nathanael West had published by the time he died in a car accident at the age of thirty-seven occupy a unique niche in American literature.A Hollywood screenwriter who migrated from studio to studio in search of sustenance, West was a humorist with a warped conscience, a young man who had fraudulently gained admission to Brown University and probably belonged there anyway, an intellectual misfit trying to make a living and a name for himself in a glitzy industry.Like Kafka with a comic-strip aesthetic, West saw the world and the people around him as the tortured products of an insane creator, cartoons to be stretched, punched, and mutilated.

"Few things are sadder than the truly monstrous," West observes in "The Day of the Locust," the last of his novels, which made an indelible impression upon me when I first read it a few years ago.Ironically, sadness is definitely not the note he strikes in his portrayal of a congregation of hilarious cretins who populate the fringes of 1930s Hollywood; it is a very brash and "loud" novel, but incredibly it is more refined and less outrageous than its three predecessors.The surrealistic narrative of "The Dream Life of Balso Snell," by contrast, is not to be read with a queasy stomach.The unassuming Mr. Snell happens upon a giant wooden horse--apparently the same the ancient Greeks used to infiltrate Troy--and, entering through the posterior, finds the intestines inhabited by unhinged writers in search of an audience.

In "Miss Lonelyhearts," the title character (who is a man) is an advice columnist for a newspaper, unable to muster anything better than empty platitudes in response to tearful letters from barely literate and improbably pathetic losers who are mostly beyond help.He is not, however, doing this just as a hoax; he approaches his role soberly because the trust his correspondents place in him forces him to "examine the values by which he lives."If "Miss Lonelyhearts" seems farcical, consider how accurately it prophesies the Jerry Springer era of televised dirty laundry and voluntary public embarrassment.

"A Cool Million" is a relentlessly cruel Horatio Alger parody that follows the misadventures of Lemuel Pitkin, a Vermont boy who goes to New York to try to make a fortune in order to save his mother's house from foreclosure but is foiled continually as he encounters an endless procession of human sleaze: corrupt businessmen, brutish cops, brothel operators and their clientele, rapists, thieves, and con men.(The screen story West wrote for "A Cool Million"--a project never filmed--is understandably so much cleaner and more optimistic that it hardly resembles the original novel.)

The four novels combined constitute only half of the Library of America volume, the rest of which includes miscellaneous fragments, plays, and letters.Among the detritus are the unsuccessful play "Good Hunting," a relatively conventional satire of war and war correspondence, an unfilmed screenplay based on Francis Iles's novel "Before the Fact" (a different screenplay by another author was used by the studio instead, and was filmed by Alfred Hitchcock as "Suspicion"), and a college essay praising Euripides to the stars.This juxtaposition effectively illuminates the two dichotomous worlds of West--the true artist and the commercial hack, the grotesque emerging from the mundane.

Artless?
It's beyond me how anyone could describe the prose of Lonelyhearts and Locust as "artless" (as one reviewer did). I can understand how some might find the bitterness and despair of these two works not to their liking. But artless? Years after reading these two novels, I can recall entire passages by heart and picture the scenes vividly. Such effects are not achieved by artless amateur writers, only by those with considerable literary talent.

That said, I must agree with the other reviewers here: The remaining stuff collected by LOA is distinctly second-rate, the product of West on a bad day or before he reached his stride. Only if you are a scholar researching twentieth-century American novelists should you buy this volume. Get the inexpensive paperback book published by New Directions, containing the two imperishable works Lonelyhearts and Locust.

Is LOA Running Out of Good American Authors?
As a long-standing and avid reader of the fiction volumes produced by the Library of America, I eagerly awaited this book and now I can't understand why they printed it. I stopped reading after about 400 pages and haven't been able to garner the energy and patience for more. 'Miss Lonelyhearts' was slightly interesting, but a very slight novel written in an artless manner. As for the rest of what I read, I consider it time not at all well spent. Dreiser, another author featured by the Library of America, created artless prose also...but he did so in the context of engaging stories that offered intellectual stimulation. I'll give this book away rather than have it consume valuable shelf space. ... Read more

Product Description
Nathanael West, American novelist, screenwriter and satirist, was born in New York City in 1903, and died in California in 1940, at the age of 37.CONTENTS: The Day of the Locust (1939); Miss Lonelyhearts (1933); The Dream Life of Balso Snell (1931); and, A Cool Million (1936). ... Read more

Product Description
"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 passes 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. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (42)

The way things really are
Miss Lonelyhearts is a book about what's really happening out there. Most of the people inhabiting this planet are blessed by the evolution with a cognitive bias which allows then not to concentrate on the "negative". Nathanael West, as well as his protagonist known in the book by his "pen name" Miss Lonelyhearts are both denied this blessing. They see things the way things really are. Which is, according to the "depressive realism" concept is the correct way to see the reality.

The protagonist, Miss Lonelyhearts, works for a newspaper. His work is to read letters by the newspaper subscribers, and based on them to write a newspaper column giving advice and providing support and counseling to the readers in their difficult situations. The problem with Miss Lonelyhearts is that he's so much depressed by unspeakable human suffering he encounters in the letters and life around him that he can't in earnest give any advice or consolation his readership expects from him.

In fact, the only advice he can give to his readers is suicide, but his editor says that his job is to increase the subscriber base, not to decrease it. This is an example of dark humor characteristic of Nathanael West. The book abounds with this type opf humor. It's also very poetic, and philosophical. The central chapter, "Miss Lonelyhearts in the Dismal Swamp", explains the terrible bind Miss Lonelyhearts finds himself in, both with his newspaper job - and with his life itself. West's power as a poetic prose writer and philosopher is especially clear in this chapter.

The events in this small book steadily take turn from bad to worse, and the protagonist, trying to emphasize with his readers' suffering, is murdered in the end by the crippled husband of one of the readers, who forces herself on Miss Lonelyhearts as a lover while he can't spare himself neither from her advances nor from her husband's friendship which eventually turns to violent hatred.

"Miss Lonelyhearts" should be compared with "The Loved One" by Evelyn Waugh, there are similar characters and parallel plot developments, even though they're very different and compliment each other in many ways. "The Loved One" actually has certain common themes with another West's novel, "The Day of the Locust", too.

West was a very powerful writer, this can be clearly seen in "Miss Lonelyhearts", as well as in "The Day of the Locust". Both deserve to be much better known, but, probably, they're to dark and unsympathetic towards American public (and humanity in general) to enjoy wider recognition.

The Day of The Locust
I first encountered "The Day of the Locusts" in a contemporary lit class back in the late 60's and reading it today was every bit as fascinating.West creates a picture of the American Dream gone bad in Hollywood in the first part of the 20th century.It is to this artificial and superficial mecca that the hopeful and hopeless, the talented and washed-up, the glib and reticent, flock for their shot at fame and glamour. And it is here, in Hollywood, that they are eaten up and spit out.Corruption and violence dominate the landscape.
Written almost a century ago, the book still has the ability to shock......and to entertain.

Two Modernist Gems
Published in 1933, the short work MISS LONELYHEARTS shares a strikingly similar tone of despair and desperation with its Hollywood-focused counterpart THE DAY OF THE LOCUST, yet has its own unique voice. The protagonist, referred to only by the name of his newspaper column, Miss Lonelyhearts, is drawn by West as a pathetic yet endearingly earnest man, who strives to uplift the world of others as an attempt to uplift his own life. Unfortunately, he fails at every endeavor, presented as an educated, almost erudite man with scholarly thought, who cannot quite find his place or connect with those around him. He is full of impotent rage, repressed sexual drives, and a need to destroy everything that comes in contact with him.

The literary language is always interesting and unique, striving for heights of elegance, absurdity and truth. Miss Lonelyhearts's boss and rival, Shrike, has the most entertaining dialogue, full of bluster and imagination, satire and insight. The book is a modernist's dream, filled with desperate characters, awkward dramatic events, and a bleak, hopeless ending. Worth a read, despite (or because of) its savage, unrelenting nature.

THE DAY OF THE LOCUST (published in 1939) is the better known novel of the two, but I think the earlier work hits more high literary notes with less meandering and expositional drudgery.

Two brilliant and scathing parodies dealing with the betrayal of the "American Dream"
MISS LONLEYHEARTS and DAY OF THE LOCUST are wonderful short novels. MISS LONELYHEARTS in particular can be listed among the great works produced by an American writer in the 20th century. Nathanael West filtered and focused his experiences in Depression Era New York, and later Hollywood, with laser like precision, into outrageous, and caustically humorous parodies of an America where hopes and dreams are shattered against the steel wall of reality, where external suffering takes a backseat to internal agonies of a psychological and spiritual nature, where religion is an opiate, art a diversion, and love a hopeless delusion. Both, are powerfully pessimistic, and incisive expressions of their time and milieu..fatal visions from a prophetic mind.

Not So Quiet Desperation
Gin-soaked Christ for the Lovelorn:

The 'Miss Lonelyhearts' of Nathanael West's 1933 novella is a male reporter for the New York Post-Dispatch, whose cynical, boozy, manic editor Shrike has assigned him the task of responding with advice to myriads ofheartsick/soulsick letter-writers. Bozzy and bipolar himself, Miss L - no other name is given him - at first takes his role as a huge joke, until the heartsickness he discovers begins to resonate with his own religious despair. In the first sentence, we readers find him at his desk, painfully unable to produce the necessary hypocritical pap to meet his copy deadline. West writes:

""When Miss Lonelyhearts quit work, he found that the weather had turned warm and that the air smelt as if it had been artificially heated. He decided to walk to Delehanty's speakeasy for a drink. In order to get there, it was necessary to cross a little park.
He entered the park park at the North Gate and swallowed mouthfuls of the heavy shade that curtained its arch. he walked into the shadow of a lamp-post that lay on the path like a spear. It pierced him like a spear.
As far as he could discover, there were no signs of spring. The decay that covered the surface of the mottled ground was not the kind in which life generates. Last year, he remembered, May had failed to quicken these soiled fields. It had taken all the brutality of July to torture a few green spikes through the exhausted dirt.
What the little park needed, even more than he did, was a drink. Neither alcohol nor rain would do. Tomorrow, in his column, he would ask Broken-hearted, Sick-of-it-all, Desperate, Disillusioned-with-tubercular-husband and all the rest of his correspondents to come here and water the soil with their tears. Flowers would then spring up, flowers that smelled of feet.""

That, I submit, is awfully fine writing, imaginatively equal to the best of Nabokov, and fine writing is the fundamental reason for reading fiction, isn't it? But it's also awfully focused, concentrated writing. The spear metaphor, for instance, hints ever so subtly of the spear that pierced the side of Christ on the Cross, especially since Christ had already been alluded to, semi-jocularly, a page earlier. Slowly and slyly, West lets us sense that this short tale of world-weary absurdity is a Passion play, and that the foolish pleas and plaints of the maimed, grotesque, hapless correspondents are the sum of human woe. And for the Cynic, to empathize even scornfully with the woes of humanity is fatal.

Readers familiar with the stories and novellas of Flannery O'Connor will surely notice an affinity, possibly even a transmission of influence from West in the 1930s to O'Connor in the late 1940s and 1950s. West's characters, however, are both less grotesque and more intriguing - being more accessible to sympathy - than O'Connor's. Likewise, West's Christ-hunger is less inhumane, less anti-humanist, than O'Connor's hate-soaked hopelessness. One could imagine a benign God feeling pity for West's sad sinners.

I read this book in college, decades ago, and immediately recommended it to my high-school-aged sister, who wrote a 'book report' on it. Neither of us remember what she wrote, or what we thought then that the book was about, but my sister's English teacher - a former local beauty queen - gave the paper an F. "You were supposed to read a classic," she jeered, "not something you picked up from the rack at the bus station!"

I've got news for her; this is a classic. I'm profoundly glad that I picked it up again.

****

Apocalypse with Palm Trees:

Too bad Nathanael West didn't live long enough to work with the Coen Brothers! Instead he wrote screenplays for B-grade films in a Hollywood that considered language an obstacle to art. Luckily he also found scraps of time to write five novellas and a couple of stories, and two of those novellas - Day of the Locust & Miss Lonelyhearts - are in a class by themselves, the most original and incisive American fiction of the 1930s.

Day of the Locust is a wild and willful satire of Hollywood and the film industry, a Coen Brothers film in very well-crafted prose, killingly funny and at the same time fearfully sad. The focus character is an artist who has come to Hollywood to escape the art-school banality of painting red barns and lily-pads. Now he's working on a single apocalyptic painting -- "Hollywood in Flames" -- depicting the desperate anomie of "those who have come to California to die." In the foreground of his painting will be all the bizarre hapless cast of people in his own grungy screenplay life. The painting is the novella, and the novella is the painting, a point that many readers seem to have missed. It's a quick read, friends, and a tightly assembled script, and I don't really want to mute the excitement of reading it by blabbing too much of the action.

As a depiction of Southern California as it was in the 1930s, it's worth a thousand books of sociology, rich with sketches of "...the cultists of all sorts, economic as well as religious, the wave, airplane, funeral and preview watchers - all those poor devils who can only be stirred by the promise of miracles and then only to violence... marching behind his banner in a great unified front of screwballs and screwboxes to purify the land." Not even Raymond Chandler ever captured the tawdry menace and lurid intoxication of Los Angeles as well as West.Hollywood was truly the Potemkin Village of desires, where everyone was his own leading lady and the next person's 'extra'.

And it's bigger and better-dressed today - Los Angeles, I mean - with the Getty Museum and the Disney Center for the Arts, but anyone who has lived or worked there will know that 'The Day of the Locust' is still a true picture of its permanent impermanence and ever-impending transience.

****

The two novellas are not as similar as their verbal style makes them seem. The lust for Christian securities that West exposed in himself in Miss Lonelyhearts is not sustained in Day of the Locust. The latter novel resolves West's religious quest in total apocalyptic nihilism. The poignant pitiful individuals whose letters tormented Miss L have become the insensate raging mob of 'modern' life.

... Read more

Product Description
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...

***

Customer Reviews (46)

Typos!
This kindle edition of THE DAY OF THE LOCUST has a lot of typos. The first chapter alone has three, including "truculent" spelled as "truculentas" (Is it being typed in a Tiajuana chop shop?).Annoying. I will read on a bit, but if I find many more, I will be returning the book.

Apocalypse with Palm Trees
Too bad Nathanael West didn't live long enough to work with the Coen Brothers! Instead he wrote screenplays for B-grade films in a Hollywood that considered language an obstacle to art. Luckily he also found scraps of time to write five novellas and a couple of stories, and two of those novellas - Day of the Locust & Miss Lonelyhearts - are in a class by themselves, the most original and incisive American fiction of the 1930s.

Day of the Locust is a wild and willful satire of Hollywood and the film industry, a Coen Brothers film in very well-crafted prose, killingly funny and at the same time fearfully sad. The focus character is an artist who has come to Hollywood to escape the art-school banality of painting red barns and lily-pads. Now he's working on a single apocalyptic painting -- "Hollywood in Flames" -- depicting the desperate anomie of "those who have come to California to die." In the foreground of his painting will be all the bizarre hapless cast of people in his own grungy screenplay life. The painting is the novella, and the novella is the painting, a point that many readers seem to have missed. It's a quick read, friends, and a tightly assembled script, and I don't really want to mute the excitement of reading it by blabbing too much of the action.

As a depiction of Southern California as it was in the 1930s, it's worth a thousand books of sociology, rich with sketches of "...the cultists of all sorts, economic as well as religious, the wave, airplane, funeral and preview watchers - all those poor devils who can only be stirred by the promise of miracles and then only to violence... marching behind his banner in a great unified front of screwballs and screwboxes to purify the land." Not even Raymond Chandler ever captured the tawdry menace and lurid intoxication of Los Angeles as well as West.Hollywood was truly the Potemkin Village of desires, where everyone was his own leading lady and the next person's 'extra'.

And it's bigger and better-dressed today - Los Angeles, I mean - with the Getty Museum and the Disney Center for the Arts, but anyone who has lived or worked there will know that 'The Day of the Locust' is still a true picture of its permanent impermanence and impending transience.

An exercise in pessimism
The Day of the Locust takes place in Hollywood in 1939, at the end of the depression and the brink of World War II.The book is a character study of the interactions of various hanger-ons at the edges of the motion picture industry.The book is written in a tone of absolute dispair, and it tries to point out how pointless dreams and wishes are.There is no joy to be found in sunshine, oranges, the ocean, life... My optimistic soul wanted to rage against the author and the characters.I guess I can understand how a Jewish man would feel a sense of pessimism in 1939, but I can't recommend the book as anything but an example of the wrong way to see the world.

Still True Today
I lived in Southern California during most of the 1980s (San Diego), and after reading this book, I was amazed at how little had changed since 1939, the year this book was published.West draws perfectly the despair and rootless emptiness underlying the pretty smiles, watered landscapes, imported plants and wonderful lifestyles.Reading this book reminded me of how I found the sight of a palm tree disturbing for years after I moved away.

West also insightfully points out that the absurd culture has been produced by the transients, not the long time natives.I remember putting down Southern California in front of a native one time - she became upset and said "You people made it like this."

A better book about Hollywood. . .
Extraordinary!
This is not caricature. This was the "feel" of society--as felt by Nathanael West--in the Hollywood of the 1930s.
More frighteningly, this was, I believe, West's forecast for the "feel" of future American society.
How correct his vision! ... Read more

Product Description
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... ... Read more

Product Description

NATHANAEL WEST novelist, screenwriter, playwright, devoted outdoorsman was one of the most gifted and original writers of his generation, a comic artist whose insight into the brutalities of modern life proved prophetic. He is famous for two masterpieces, Miss Lonelyhearts (1933) and The Day of the Locust (1939). Seventy years later, The Day of the Locust remains the most penetrating novel ever written about Hollywood. 

EILEEN MCKENNEY accidental muse, literary heroine was the inspiration for her sister Ruth s humorous stories, My Sister Eileen, which led to stage, film, and television adaptations, including Leonard Bernstein s 1953 musical Wonderful Town.  She grew up in Cleveland and moved to Manhattan at 21 in search of romance and adventure. She and her sister lived in a basement apartment in the Village with a street-level window into which men frequently peered. 

 

Husband and wife were intimate with F. Scott Fitzgerald, Dorothy Parker, Katharine White, S.J. Perelman, Bennett Cerf, and many of the literary, theatrical, and movie notables of their era.  With Lonelyhearts, biographer Marion Meade, whose Bobbed Hair and Bathtub Gin earned accolades from the Washington Post Book World ("Wonderful") to the San Francisco Chronicle ("Like looking at a photo album while listening to a witty insider reminisce about the images"), restores West and McKenney to their rightful places in the rich cultural tapestry of interwar America.

Amazon.com Review
Product Description
NATHANAEL WEST--novelist, screenwriter, playwright, devoted outdoorsman--was one of the most gifted and original writers of his generation, a comic artist whose insight into the brutalities of modern life proved prophetic. He is famous for two masterpieces, Miss Lonelyhearts (1933) and The Day of the Locust (1939). Seventy years later, The Day of the Locust remains the most penetrating novel ever written about Hollywood.

EILEEN MCKENNEY--accidental muse, literary heroine--was the inspiration for her sister Ruth's humorous stories, My Sister Eileen, which led to stage, film, and television adaptations, including Leonard Bernstein's 1953 musical Wonderful Town. She grew up in Cleveland and moved to Manhattan at 21 in search of romance and adventure. She and her sister lived in a basement apartment in the Village with a street-level window into which men frequently peered.

Husband and wife were intimate with F. Scott Fitzgerald, Dorothy Parker, Katharine White, S.J. Perelman, Bennett Cerf, and many of the literary, theatrical, and movie notables of their era. With Lonelyhearts, biographer Marion Meade, whose Bobbed Hair and Bathtub Gin earned accolades from the Washington Post Book World ("Wonderful") to the San Francisco Chronicle ("Like looking at a photo album while listening to a witty insider reminisce about the images"), restores West and McKenney to their rightful places in the rich cultural tapestry of interwar America.

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Amazon Exclusive: An Essay from Marion Meade, Author of Lonelyhearts: The Screwball World of Nathanael West and Eileen McKenney

The year 1939 turned out to be golden for Hollywood--Gone With the Wind, The Wizard of Oz--and particularly lucky for the gifted but largely undiscovered novelist and screenwriter Nathanael West. That fall, he met a sassy young Ohioan--Eileen McKenney, the All-American Girl heroine of the best-selling My Sister Eileen stories--and, though allergic to commitment, wound up marrying her a couple of months later.

It was chemistry, like one of those Frank Capra screwball comedies in which wisecracking babes are always falling for handsome heartthrobs but wind up as runaway brides in the arms of Cary Grant. Sadly, no mushy romantic finale awaited Nat and Eileen. Eight months after their wedding, just days before the Broadway premiere of the play based on her sister's stories, they died in a car crash in the middle of the lettuce fields just outside El Centro, California.

Today, West's Miss Lonelyhearts and The Day of the Locust are recognized as American masterpieces, and though McKenney is barely remembered, her legacy still lives on; My Sister Eileen became the basis for Leonard Bernstein's enchanting musical Wonderful Town. Nat and Eileen lost their lives far too soon, but with Lonelyhearts, they're back and ready for their close-ups.

(Photo © Jerry Bauer)

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A Look Inside: Lonelyhearts: The Screwball World of Nathanael West and Eileen McKenney
(Click on Images to Enlarge)

A young Nathanael West, 1917	The glamorous Eileen McKenney	Fishing was one of Nat's passions	Last known photo of Eileen, 1940

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... Read more

Customer Reviews (6)

Highly Readable "Backstory" -- partly toWonderful Town, the Play and Film
About two years ago, I Googled Ruth McKenney after accidentally catching a late night airing of the film My Sister Eileen--and have been fascinated ever since by her backstory: her vaguely sketched childhood, the wild success of the book, the resulting play and film/s (including "Wonderful Town")--and the tragic, untimely death of the titular Eileen and her new husband, novelist and screenwriter Nathanael West, just four days before the opening of the successful play. Here, Loneyhearts offers a survey of insights into these two figures, each notable and fascinating for being, in his/her own very different ways, on the periphery of literary success. I was especially fascinated with the trajectories of both West and Ruth McKenney as working writers. West, for years carefully crafting stories with repulsive, distasteful characters with some review success, while (toward the end of his life) writing lucrative B-movies with extraordinary discipline. McKenney, manic (and mentally ill), spewed volumes of homespun, highly fictionalized, (highly edited!), and highly salable "memoir" to support a lavish lifestyle, despite being philosophically committed to the Communist Party. You can't make this stuff up and the book offers a highly readable, accessible dip into fascinating--and almost lost--pieces of literary history.

A Tale Of Unfulfilled Promise With An Inappropriate Title
If modern audiences are aware of Nathanael West at all, it is on the basis of his two well-known novels Miss Lonelyhearts and The Day Of The Locust which are sometimes included as required reading in 20th century literature classes at colleges and universities. Eileen McKenney's primary claim to fame amounted to being the subject of a series of stories written about her by her sister Ruth McKenney. After her death, a play and a musical and two movies were based on these stories.
This book is primarily a dual biography of Nate and Eileen with a lot about the often depressed and sometimes suicidal writer/professional communist Ruth McKenney thrown in. I found it interesting and liked it very much. The one thing I did not like about the book was the title. I found it misleading as neither McKenney nor West could have been substitutes for characters in any number of madcap movies that were so popular in the late 1930's. Marion Meade wrote an exceptional book, but I did not find anything in it that would imply it was funny or 'screwball'. I can only guess that she was trying to sum up the era and not her subject. The McKenny sisters lives were not particularly joyous after the early death of their mother and the same could be said about the pampered and indulged West whose personal cynicism was echoed in his novels. West's real idea of fun was his fondness for hunting and running up unpaid bills at Brooks Brothers. The level of shared happiness Nate and Eileen had was short-lived. They seemed very different from one another and it is difficult to ascertain if their short lived marriage would result in a long and enduring happiness had they lived. I would have to sum this book up as the ultimate tragedy. West died before he was able to bask in the critical acceptance he craved. Eileen died before she was able to completely move away from the 'pretty' mantle bestowed upon her by her mother and become a person in her own right. Ruth never completely recovered from Eileen's death and never enjoyed much success with her infrequent subsequent work.
The level of research and footnoting on this book was first rate. Meade did a phenomenal job digging into lives of her subjects who were interesting and quirky in their own right. It is loaded with a lot of personal information about not only her main subjects, but their friends and associates. She presented an indelible picture of the dominant emerging writers of the era and provided a lot of interesting information regarding how West's contemporaries interacted with one another.
This is a great read for anyone interested in West, his works, and 20th century american literature.

Abbreviated lives...
Marion Meade's joint bio of Nathanael West and Eileen McKenney (the "Eileen" in "My Sister Eileen") is a bio of two people who lived in interesting times, but somehow never seem to come alive in the book. Meade's book is well-written as she works with the material she has. But because both subjects lived abbreviated lives, dying at age 37 and 28 in a car crash in late 1940, there's not decades of material to look at and interpret. That is particularly true of McKenney, whose major claim to fame is that of the subject of her sister's books. She comes across as beautiful/bossy/tall/blonde/a Communist-sympathiser/a mother at an early age/an office worker, etc. She moved out to Los Angeles from New York (after having moved from Cleveland in her late teens), met Nathanael West, married him, and died early. I honestly don't get the feeling there was much "there" there.

West - born Nathan Weinstein - comes off better in Meade's bio. Born into a fairly wealthy immigrant Jewish family of builders, he spent his early life as the adored first (and only) son, dropping in and out of schools -both secondary and colleges - until a somewhat disreputable application (using another Nathan Weinstein's transcript) got him into Brown. He graduated and went to work in the family business. Most of his adult life was spent writing and he eventually published four novels, the two best known are "Miss Lonelyhearts" and "The Day of the Locust". He spent his 20's living in New York and Paris, hanging out with the literary geniuses of the time, and working as a hotel manager. He really comes off as sort of a cipher; he blends in to whatever group he's with. Sexually precocious, he contacted gonorrhea several times in his life. He had no real relationships with women - a couple of possible "engagements" - before he met and married Eileen McKenney. I'm actually a little confused about his attraction - and vise-versa -with McKenney.

West died before he could taste true literary fame. And before he could experience a true home life with wife and child. I wonder how different - and more interesting - McKenney and West's lives would have been if they had lived longer.

Biting the hand
It's one of the oddest Venn diagrams in American literature: Nathanael West, the writer of surreal, cynical, apocalyptic novels, meets Eileen McKenney, the charming heroine of her sister's series of comic memoirs. They marry and eight months later are killed when West, a notoriously bad driver, speeds through a stop sign. The West marriage gives Meade a chance to discuss two distinct threads in American literature and to throw in commentary on the couple's circle. The problem is that she doesn't really have much interesting to say about the literary world in which the couple moved. Moreover, while West left behind a large paper trail with which a biographer can work, Eileen McKenney West did not. Meade writes quite scornfully of the "corny" stories Ruth McKenney wrote about growing up in Ohio and living in Greenwich Village, criticizing her work for exaggeration and for existing in a no man's land, neither fact nor fiction; however, Ruth McKenney's stories are the *only* source given for several of the most dramatic stories Meade retells. (Though you have to turn to the footnotes to figure this out.) Eileen West McKenney sounds like a charming and likable woman, but one questions whether there is enough information about her to justify a biography--even half of one.

A Different World
Eccentric characters abound in this somewhat informal, breezily written biography.S. J. Perelman, F. Scott FitzGerald, and various Hollywood denizens are all here.And the author does an exceptional job in placing Nathanael West and Eileen McKenney within the social context of the Depression and pre-war America.

This biography is actually focused on three people--a good portionof the book centers on Eileen's sister Ruth, a fascinating character in her own right.The author spends perhaps too much time on the McKenney/Flynn clans, but fortunately, most of the sisters' ancestral background is relegated to the notes section of the book.

It is the gradual coming together of these two very different people--Nat and Eileen--that drives the narrative forward toward its grisly, yet sensitvely-handled, conclusion.

Highly recommended.

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I would sell it -- book complete with dust cover.Excellent
West is only fairly judged by the breadth of his work.He has a special view of human nature and all its weaknesses. ... Read more

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This is a collection of West`s novels - "The Dream Life of Balso Snell", "Miss Lonely-hearts, "A Cool Million" and "The Day of the Locust". ... Read more

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Set in New York during the Great Depression, Miss Lonelyhearts concerns a nameless man assigned to produce a newspaper advice column — but as time passes 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. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (2)

The key issued is told, not shown.
This review is for the Dramatists Play Service Inc. paperback edition, January 1998.MISS LONELYHEARTS, a play based on Nathanael West's novel of the same title, was the second of five plays written by Mr. Teichmann that played on Broadway.It played October 3 to October 12, 1957, twelve performances.

William Shrike, editor of the Chronicle, chooses a young, leg-man reporter to write a new advice to the lovelorn column in the newspaper.The title of the column, and the young man's name in the play, are Miss Lonelyhearts.

Shrike perceives the column as a mockery, its only purpose to boost circulation.Miss Lonelyhearts initially handles the spoof well, but then begins to feel empathy for the people writing to him and guilty about the insincerity of his responses.This conflict puts him at odds with himself and Shrike, which leads to a tragic ending.

Although the play includes excerpts from some of the letters to Miss Lonelyhearts, it omits his replies, which are only characterized in the dialogue.This one-sided exchange diminishes the thrust of the plot.The key issued is told, not shown.

Comic brilliance, grotesque violence and early death
This work is in away very difficult to read. The painful stories Miss Lonelyhearts receive often have a grotesque dimension but also may touch the heart. The novel's ironic play with its hero who is at once fake and real sufferer, sympathizer and exploiter makes it difficult for the reader to know how exactly to take it. The writing has a violence and power in it but its tragic story too somehow misses to make its fullest case in sympathy, for Miss Lonelyhearts appears somehow real and unreal at once.
The work of a brilliant but deeply disturbed young writer whose life and work had no second act. ... Read more

Product Description
Nathanael West has been hailed as an apocalyptic writer, a writer on the left, and a precursor to postmodernism. But until now no critic has succeeded in fully engaging Wests distinctive method of negation. In American Superrealism, Jonathan Veitch examines Wests letters, short stories, screenplays and novelssome of which are discussed here for the first timeas well as Wests collaboration with William Carlos Williams during their tenure as the editors of Contact. Locating West in a lively, American avant-garde tradition that stretches from Marcel Duchamp to Andy Warhol, Veitch explores the possibilities and limitations of dada and surrealismthe use of readymades, scatalogical humor, human machines, exquisite corpsesas modes of social criticism. American Superrealism offers what is surely the definitive study of West, as well as a provocative analysis that reveals the issue of representation as the central concern of Depression-era America.A landmark in literary and cultural studies. Veitch considers the crucial decade of the 1930s in light of the work of Nathanael West; the result is a sweeping revision, not only of Wests achievement but of the broad social, aesthetic, and intellectual movements that shaped modern America. It is perhaps the best analysis from within of the Depression Decade, a comprehensive overview of the influence in this country of dada and surrealism, a compelling analysis of the dynamics of mass culture, and the best study we have of the achievement and significance of Nathanael West.Sacvan Bercovitch, Carswell Professor of American and English Literature, Harvard University

Sophisticated. Veitchs great virtue is his ability to place West within a complex web of issues relating to the production of social knowledge and the problem of representation. In doing so, he gives us a fresh view of West and of the period as a whole.Miles Orvell, author of After the Machine: Visual Arts & the Erasing of Cultural Boundaries

Abrilliant contribution to Nathanael West studies and American studies more generally.Dickran Tashjian, author of A Boatload of Madmen: Surrealism and the American Avant-Garde, 1920-1950 ... Read more

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AMAZING!!
AMAZING BOOK!! MUST BUY!! SUCH INSIGHTFUL AND UNIQUE IDEAS PRESENTED THROUGH EASY TO READ CONTEXT. American Superrealism: Nathanael West and the Politics of Representation in the 1930s (Wisconsin Project on American Writers) ... Read more

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The Great Depression and the Culture of Abundance examines the response of American leftist writers of the 1930s to the rise of mass culture, and to the continued propagation of the values of consumerism during the Depression. Rita Barnard traces in the work of Kenneth Fearing and Nathanael West theoretical positions associated with the Frankfurt School (especially Walter Benjamin) and with contemporary theorists of postmodernism. As well as probing the relationship between literature and mass culture, the book offers a new reading of two of the most unjustifiably neglected literary figures of the 1930s. ... Read more

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Nathaniel West's story of an advice columnist sits alongside the great works of Fitzgerald, Hemingway, and Faulkner.Amazon.com Review
A book of wicked wit, Miss Lonelyhearts is the saga of a young(male) newspaper advice columnist who grows despondent reading the piles ofletters from the broken and the confused. Miss Lonelyhearts takes to sicknessfor relief until his gruff editor, Shrike, tells him to get over it and turnto Christ, "the Miss Lonelyhearts of Miss Lonelyhearts." Thisadvice propels Miss Lonelyhearts into a period of soul-searching that sendshim to both the church and the bottle. He stumbles through a series ofmisadventures, cascading the novel humorously and tragically along to asurprising end. ... Read more

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Gin-soaked Christ for the Lovelorn
The 'Miss Lonelyhearts' of Nathanael West's 1933 novella is a male reporter for the New York Post-Dispatch, whose cynical, boozy, manic editor Shrike has assigned him the task of responding with advice to myriads ofheartsick/soulsick letter-writers. Boozy and bipolar himself, Miss L - no other name is given him - at first takes his role as a huge joke, until the heartsickness he discovers begins to resonate with his own religious despair. In the first sentence, we readers find him at his desk, painfully unable to produce the necessary hypocritical pap to meet his copy deadline. West writes:

""When Miss Lonelyhearts quit work, he found that the weather had turned warm and that the air smelt as if it had been artificially heated. He decided to walk to Delehanty's speakeasy for a drink. In order to get there, it was necessary to cross a little park.
He entered the park park at the North Gate and swallowed mouthfuls of the heavy shade that curtained its arch. he walked into the shadow of a lamp-post that lay on the path like a spear. It pierced him like a spear.
As far as he could discover, there were no signs of spring. The decay that covered the surface of the mottled ground was not the kind in which life generates. Last year, he remembered, May had failed to quicken these soiled fields. It had taken all the brutality of July to torture a few green spikes through the exhausted dirt.
What the little park needed, even more than he did, was a drink. Neither alcohol nor rain would do. Tomorrow, in his column, he would ask Broken-hearted, Sick-of-it-all, Desperate, Disillusioned-with-tubercular-husband and all the rest of his correspondents to come here and water the soil with their tears. Flowers would then spring up, flowers that smelled of feet.""

That, I submit, is awfully fine writing, imaginatively equal to the best of Nabokov, and fine writing is the fundamental reason for reading fiction, isn't it? But it's also awfully focused, concentrated writing. The spear metaphor, for instance, hints ever so subtly of the spear that pierced the side of Christ on the Cross, especially since Christ had already been alluded to, semi-jocularly, a page earlier. Slowly and slyly, West lets us sense that this short tale of world-weary absurdity is a Passion play, and that the foolish pleas and plaints of the maimed, grotesque, hapless correspondents are the sum of human woe. And for the Cynic, to empathize even scornfully with the woes of humanity is fatal.

Readers familiar with the stories and novellas of Flannery O'Connor will surely notice an affinity, possibly even a transmission of influence from West in the 1930s to O'Connor in the late 1940s and 1950s. West's characters, however, are both less grotesque and more intriguing - being more accessible to sympathy - than O'Connor's. Likewise, West's Christ-hunger is less inhumane, less anti-humanist, than O'Connor's hate-soaked hopelessness. One could imagine a benign God feeling pity for West's sad sinners.

I read this book in college, decades ago, and immediately recommended it to my high-school-aged sister, who wrote a 'book report' on it. Neither of us remember what she wrote, or what we thought then that the book was about, but my sister's English teacher - a former local beauty queen - gave the paper an F. "You were supposed to read a classic," she jeered, "not something you picked up from the rack at the bus station!"

I've got news for her; this is a classic. I'm profoundly glad that I picked it up again.

"Christ: the Miss Lonelyhearts of Miss Lonelyhearts."
"Miss Lonelyhearts" is the 26-year-old son of a Baptist preacher, working in New York in 1933 as the writer of a gossip column. A sensitive person, he reads thirty or so traumatic letters from readers every day, ranging from women with too many children and abusive husbands, to people who have no idea where their next meal will come from, and he must offer some sort of hope to each one. Shrike, a features editor, is his antithesis, a nihilist who mocks Miss Lonelyhearts's Christian faith, every other philosophy which might offer hope, and Miss Lonelyhearts's every attempt to escape from the sadness of his life. Sex and alcohol do not help, and Miss Lonelyhearts gradually descends into obsessive behavior, hypochondria, and religious fanaticism while still trying to help his readers, several of whom he meets in person.

Though the novel is often described as having dark humor, its emotional power is so overwhelming that few people will find much to laugh about here. Shrike, whose name is both satiric and symbolic (shrikes are birds which impale their prey on thorns, much as a butcher hangs meat on a hook), is bent on destroying Miss Lonelyhearts and what he represents (the search for hope), and at a party Shrike has all the guests read aloud and mock the letters from Miss Lonelyhearts's desk--about paralyzed children, a teenager without a nose, suicidal mothers, and exhausted caregivers.

Tautly constructed with overlapping motifs and symbols, the novel is firmly rooted in the Depression and the edge-of-disaster lives of ordinary Americans. As Miss Lonelyhearts becomes drawn into his readers' heart-rending problems, he tries to become a rock, emotionally and symbolically, and as he examines the sadness around him, he also begins to think that God has sent him to perform the kinds of miracles that God performs. West's satiric attitude toward religion here and the use of Miss Lonelyhearts as a Christ-figure, filled with agony and passion, also suggest some sort of satiric Christian martyrdom, but the ending, when it comes, is shocking and unexpected.

Extremely emotional and filled with cynicism and despair, the novel is the consummate example of Depression literature, firmly establishing the attitudes and philosophies that prevailed as people tried to deal with events so overwhelming that no philosophy, other than nihilism, could fully explain them. West's focus on themes and philosophies and the symbols which illuminate them prevents this brilliant but often heart-rending novel from descending into melodrama and pathos. This edition, edited by Harold Bloom, offers a full range of critical interpretations. n Mary Whipple

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One star for 'Snell' and three for 'A Cool Million'
'The Dream Life of Balso Snell' is an incoherent and nearly unintelligible narrative of a man, Balso, who discovers the Trojan horse and climbs into the body through the anus.Inside, he encounters different characters, which he soon realizes symbolize different types of writers, and has long, rambling, allegorical conversations with them.I had a difficult time finishing this book, and seriously considered putting it down.Whatever merits it possesses are soon lost in the juvenile and amateurish writing (in fairness, this was West's first book), and the scatological references quickly grow tiring to this reader.As a parody of surrealist or absurdist or even modernist literature, 'Balso Snell' may have its points, but I simply couldn't sustain interest in its mode of delivery, nor the concentration necessary to puzzle out his references.And although some critics and reviewers describe 'Balso' as a comic novel, West's attempts at humor struck me as sophomoric and puerile.Were 'The Dream Life of Balso Snell' the only novel here, I would rate it one star, as my time is better spent on too many other things.

'A Cool Million' somewhat rescues this volume if I take into consideration its historical context, and, in the used edition that I have, it's apparent by the marginalia that someone used it for a literature class, which indicates that there is at least one teacher who also feels it has something to say about the times.My assessment though is that there must be better examples than what West attempted with 'Million' from which to choose, but I can also see that, in the interest of adding variety to the syllabus year after year, an instructor might include 'Million' as an example critiquing the American Dream.

I've heard 'Horatio Alger story in reverse' connected to 'Million' a few times, but its style reminds me more of 'Candide 'instead (as another reviewer pointed out).The subtitle to the novel, 'The Dismantling of Lemuel Pitkin' is surely accurate, and much like Voltaire's novel, the hero begins with a positive and naive view of the world, given to him by an older, seemingly wiser man.Lemuel Pitkin then strikes out on his own to make his fortune, but runs into one horrible circumstance after another, as do his motley collection of friends and acquaintances, and his ladylove.Again, as in 'Candide', Lem never loses his positive outlook, no matter what terrible thing happens, and eventually reaches as spot that might parallel the point at which Candide and his friends reach their final destination and begin a little farm.Except in 'A Cool Million', Lem isn't allowed to simply 'tend to his garden', and the cruel world continues to dismantle him.

Overall, I disliked 'Million' for its excruciating treatment of its characters, but I did find his examination of how martyrs are constructed interesting.West, quite cynically, is not only giving us an unvarnished look as the American Dream, but also a look at the way examples are held up to succeeding generations as someone to emulate, even though those same examples never sought out their troubles, and would have strongly wished for their lives to be different. It's as if, even after they are dead and gone, the world continues to use them as it will.

Whether as a parody of 'Candide' or of Horatio Alger, ultimately I thought West's style in 'Million' came across as affected and too clever.Despite any insights I detected in this second novel, mentally I shrug my shoulders at the end and think 'it's ok'.

"A Cool Million" is The Great American Political Satire
While "Balso Snell" is funny in a late-Mark Twain kind of way, the real reason to buy this book is "A Cool Million," the Great American Political Satire. Written in the 1930's (and if you know anything about the wacko American Right of that decade, you'll realize that West is not exaggerrating too much) "A Cool Million" still packs a satirical punch. This is probably because, unfortunately, the right-wing wackos West skewers have now taken over the American asylum...

Interesting Failures
Although he was little known during his short lifetime, Nathanael West's MISS LONELYHEARTS and THE DAY OF THE LOCUST are two of the most influential works of 20th Century American Literature.They are the best of West's work, and I recommend them very highly.But West's work was extremely hit or miss, and this edition of his two lesser novels demonstrate that fact in abundance.

THE DREAM LIFE OF BALSO SNELL is West's first novel, a surrealistic fantasy about a man who stumbles upon the Trojan Horse, climbs into the rectum, and meanders through the horse's lower intestines.Along the way he meets an aesthetically argumentative guide, a biographer who is writing a biography of a biographer, a mystic who is attempting to crucify himself with thumbtacks, and sundry others.There is an abundance of ideas here, some of them quite amusing and entertaining, but ultimately this parody of bad-taste pseudo-intellectualism becomes as bad-taste pseudo-intellectual as its subjects.

Written between MISS LONELYHEARTS and LOCUST, A COOL MILLION satirizes the American dream via an extended parody of the Horatio Alger myth, and presents us with the story of a young man who goes out into the world to seek his fortune--and begins his adventures with his lady love sold into white slavery and he himself cast wrongfully into prison.This is an extremely bitter, often funny novel, and it is considerably more readable than BALSO SNELL, but its dryness quickly becomes tedious and the work lags far, far behind either MISS LONELYHEARTS or LOCUST.

These novels are interesting failures at best, and while West fans will enjoy seeing how the writer developed but both THE DREAM LIFE OF BALSO SNELL and A COOL MILLION have more academic interest than anything else.Recommended for hardcore fans, but all others should pass them by.

"A Cool Million": A Stomach Churning Satire
Former President of the United States Nathan "Shagpoke" Whipple, now C.E.O. of the Rat River National Bank of the town of Ottsville, Vermont, tells young Lemuel Pitkin, "The story of (John D.) Rockefeller and of (Henry) Ford is the story of every great American...Like them, you were born poor and on a farm.Like them, by honesty and industry, you cannot fail to succeed."

With this advice in hand thus begins Lem's journey to secure his fortune and to prevent the foreclosure on his mother's house.The only collateral Lem can put up for the tiny loan he obtains from Whipple's bank is the family cow.After all, according to the ex-President, you must have some money in order to make money.

"A Cool Million" is Nathanael West's mordantly witty and deeply bitter satire of a decent, but profoundly naive young man's attempts to achieve the American Dream during the darkest days of the Great Depression.West effectively lampoons the false promise of the old maxim that hard work and diligence equals success in America. For all his determination, Lem suffers one horrible indignity after another and is ripped to shreds in the process. A pawn in a facist plot to take over New York City, his final achievement is an unintended martyrdom.

The only thing that prevents me from giving this small gem a 5 star review is the constant feeling of dread that I felt in the pit of my stomach while reading this extraordinarily disturbing novella.

For the West completist only
[NOTE: This review refers only to A Cool Million.]

Nathanael West, A Cool Million (Berkeley, 1934)

Despite having published less than six hundred pages of material in his short and rather unhappy life, Nathanael West is revered in critical circles for two groundbreaking American novels, Miss Lonelyhearts and The Day of the Locust. West published three other novels during his lifetime, and while Lonelyhearts and Locust are constantly in print, the others-- The Dream Life of Balso Snell, A Cool Million, and Good Hunting-- are considerably harder to get hold of. (There is a hardcover edition of four of the novels, excluding Good Hunting, in print from the library of America.) Reading A Cool Million, it's not hard to see why it might not be as popular as his two better-known works.

A Cool Million is a vicious satire of the Horatio Alger stereotypes popular during the Depression, the endless stories of how anyone with enough gumption could succeed in America. West takes an Alger-like hero, Lemuel Pitkin, and sends him on his way to the big city to make his fortune (actually, he's after $1500, but we'll put that aside). By the time he reaches the big city, he's been robbed and arrested. And things only get worse from there. The supporting cast contains not a single likable character (by design) save Pitkin, who's more pathetic than likable, and his childhood sweetheart, whom we first meet as she's being abducted by white slavers to work in a Chinese brothel. Everyone's out for something, and most of them seem to wact to extract it from poor Pitkin.

It is satire that, by turns, treads the edge and hops over it into that fuzzy area where one can't be sure whether West is still being satirical, or whether he's letting a nasty streak of his own show. This far removed from the book's timeliness and publication date, only scholars can be sure, and thus the book doesn't hold up as well as it otherwise might. But if you're not a fan of the Horatio Alger mythology, this should be right up your alley. ** ... Read more