The Day of the Locust

Blurb

The Day of the Locust is a 1939 novel by American author Nathanael West, set in Hollywood, California. The novel follows a young artist from the Yale School of Fine Arts named Tod Hackett who travels to California in search of inspiration for a new painting titled "The Burning of Los Angeles," which Tod is set to begin. While the cast of characters Tod befriends are a conglomerate of Hollywood stereotypes, his greater discovery is a part of society whose "eyes filled with hatred," and "had come to California to die." This undercurrent of society captures the despair of Americans who worked and saved their entire lives only to realize, too late, that the American dream was more illusive than they imagine. Their anger boils into rage, and the craze over the latest Hollywood premier erupts violently into mob rule and absolute chaos.
In the introduction to The Day of the Locust, Richard Gehman writes, the novel was "more ambitious" than Miss Lonelyhearts, and "showed marked progress in West's thinking and in his approach toward maturity as a writer." Gehman calls the novel "episodic in structure, but panoramic in form."