The Complete Works of Nathanael West

The Complete Works of Nathanael West
Author: Nathanael West
Publisher: New York : Farrar, Straus and Cudahy
Total Pages: 508
Release: 1957
Genre: Advice columnists
ISBN:

'The Dream Life of Balso Snell' (1931), originally published in Paris, is in words of Robert Coates 'a fantasy, about some rather scatological adventures of the hero in the innards of the Trojan Horse.' 'Miss Lonelyhearts' (1933) is considered his [the author's] masterpiece. 'It is one of the books, ' writes Malcolm Cowley, 'that had very few readers for the first edition, but simply refuse to be forgotten.' 'A Cool Million' (1936), with the subtitle, 'The Dismantling of Lemuel Pitkin, ' is a satiric success story in the midst of the depression, written in mock Horatio Alger Style. 'The Day of the Locust' (1939), which is considered the best novel ever written about Hollywood, is a savage indictment.'

Miss Lonelyhearts

Miss Lonelyhearts
Author: Nathanael West
Publisher: New Directions Publishing
Total Pages: 196
Release: 1969
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 9780811202152

Two classic short stories, one about a male reporter who writes an advice column, and the other, about people who have migrated to California in expectation of health and ease.

The Thousand Year Reign of Christ

The Thousand Year Reign of Christ
Author: Nathaniel West
Publisher: Rare Treasure Editions
Total Pages: 92
Release: 2021-11-08T22:32:00Z
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 1774643669

In many ways this is the most authoritative work on the thousand year reign of Christ ever to appear in English.

The Day of the Locust

The Day of the Locust
Author: Nathanael West
Publisher: DigiCat
Total Pages: 155
Release: 2022-08-16
Genre: Fiction
ISBN:

DigiCat Publishing presents to you this special edition of "The Day of the Locust" by Nathanael West. DigiCat Publishing considers every written word to be a legacy of humankind. Every DigiCat book has been carefully reproduced for republishing in a new modern format. The books are available in print, as well as ebooks. DigiCat hopes you will treat this work with the acknowledgment and passion it deserves as a classic of world literature.

Lonelyhearts

Lonelyhearts
Author: Marion Meade
Publisher: HMH
Total Pages: 435
Release: 2010-03-10
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 054748867X

A “breezily entertaining” look at the comic couple who hobnobbed with Dorothy Parker, S. J. Perelman, Bennett Cerf, and other luminaries of their day (The New York Times Book Review). Nathanael West—author, screenwriter, playwright—was famous for two masterpieces: Miss Lonelyhearts and The Day of the Locust, which remains one the most penetrating novels ever written about Hollywood. He was also one of the most gifted and original writers of his generation, a scathing satirist whose insight into the brutalities of modern life proved prophetic. Eileen McKenney—accidental muse, literary heroine—grew up corn-fed in the Midwest and moved to Manhattan’s Greenwich Village when she was twenty-one. The inspiration for her sister Ruth’s stories in the New Yorker under the banner of “My Sister Eileen,” she became an overnight celebrity, and her star eventually crossed with that of the man she would impulsively marry. Together, Nathanael and Eileen had entrée into a social circle that included F. Scott Fitzgerald, Dashiell Hammett, Katharine White, and many of the literary, theatrical, and film luminaries of the era. But their carefree, offbeat Broadway-to-Hollywood love story would flame out almost as soon as it began. Now, with “a great marriage of scholarship and gossip” (Minneapolis Star-Tribune), this biography restores West and McKenney to their rightful place in the popular imagination, offering “a shrewd portrait of two people who in their different ways were noteworthy participants in American culture during one of its liveliest periods” (Los Angeles Times). “Opens a window onto the lives of writers in 1930s America as they struggled with anxieties, pretensions, temptations and myths that confound our culture to this day.” —Salon.com “The first to fully chronicle and entwine these careening lives, Meade forges an engrossing, madcap, and tragic American story of ambition, reinvention, and risk.” —Booklist, starred review

A Cool Million

A Cool Million
Author: Nathanael West
Publisher:
Total Pages: 86
Release: 2018-10-08
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 9780464989509

A Cool Million 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.

Miss Lonelyhearts & The Day of the Locust (New Edition)

Miss Lonelyhearts & The Day of the Locust (New Edition)
Author: Nathanael West
Publisher: New Directions Publishing
Total Pages: 212
Release: 2009-06-23
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0811219380

"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.

Freaks in Late Modernist American Culture

Freaks in Late Modernist American Culture
Author: Nancy Bombaci
Publisher: Peter Lang
Total Pages: 188
Release: 2006
Genre: Foreign Language Study
ISBN: 9780820478326

Freaks in Late Modernist American Culture explores the emergence of what Nancy Bombaci terms «late modernist freakish aesthetics» - a creative fusion of «high» and «low» themes and forms in relation to distorted bodies. Literary and cinematic texts about «freaks» by Nathanael West, Djuna Barnes, Tod Browning, and Carson McCullers subvert and reinvent modern progress narratives in order to challenge high modernist literary and social ideologies. These works are marked by an acceptance of the disteleology, anarchy, and degeneration that racist discourses of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries associated with racial and ethnic outsiders, particularly Jews. In a period of American culture beset with increasing pressures for social and political conformity and with the threat of fascism from Europe, these late modernist narratives about «freaks» defy oppressive norms and values as they search for an anarchic and transformational creativity.

Los Angeles in the 1930s

Los Angeles in the 1930s
Author: WPA Writers' Program of the Work Projects Administration in Southern California
Publisher: Univ of California Press
Total Pages: 584
Release: 2011-04-05
Genre: History
ISBN: 0520268830

Previously published: New York: Hastings House, 1941, under the title Los Angeles: a guide to the city and its environs, as part of the American guide series.