Works by
Nathaniel West
(Writer)
[1902 - 1940]

Collections

• The Complete Works of Nathaniel West (1957)

• A Cool Million & The Dream Life of Balso Snell (1963)
  A Cool Million (1934) subtitled "The Dismantling of Lemuel Pitkin", is a satiric Horatio Alger story set in the midst of the Depression and is written in a bracing, mock-heroic style that has lost none of its wit or power. The Dream Life of Balso Snell (1931), West's first work, was described by one delighted critic as "a fantasy about some rather scatalogical adventures of the hero in the innards of the Trojan Horse."

• Miss Lonelyhearts & the Day of the Locust (1975)
  "Somehow or other I seem to have slipped in between all the 'schools,' " observed Nathanael West the year before his untimely death in 1940. "My books meet no needs except my own, their circulation is practically private and I'm lucky to be published." Yet today, West is widely recognized as a prophetic writer whose dark and comic vision of a society obsessed with mass-produced fantasies foretold much of what was to come in American life.

  • Miss Lonelyhearts (1933), which West envisioned as "a novel in the form of a comic strip," tells of an advice-to-the-lovelorn columnist who becomes tragically embroiled in the desperate lives of his readers.

  • The Day of the Locust (1939) is West's great dystopian Hollywood novel based on his experiences at the seedy fringes of the movie industry.

  "The work of Nathanael West, savagely, comically, tragically original, has come into its own," said novelist and screenwriter Budd Schulberg. "A new public [has] discovered in the writings of West a brilliant reflection of its own sense of chaos and helplessness in a world running more to madness than to reason."

• Nathanael West: Novels and Other Writingst (1997), Sacvan Bercovitch, ed.
  The Dream Life of Balso Snell, Miss Lonelyhearts, A Cool Million, The Day of the Locust, Letters

Fiction

• The Dream Life of Balso Snell (1931)
  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 (1933)

• A Cool Million: The Dismantling of Lemuel Pitkin (1934)

• The Day of the Locust (1939)

• Nathaniel West (1962) by Stanley Edgar Hyman
  University of Minnesota Pamphlets on American Writers, Number 21

• Nathaniel West: The Ironic Prophet (1967) vy Victor Comerchero

• Nathaniel West: The Art of His Life (1970), Jay Martin, ed.

• Nathaniel West, A Collection of Critical Essays (1971), Jay Martin, ed.