The Merriam-Webster Encyclopedia of Literature
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.
Day of the Locust FROM THE PUBLISHER
The Day of the Locustis a novel about Hollywood and its corrupting touch, about the American dream turned into a sun-drenched California nightmare. Nathaniel West's Hollywood is not the glamorous "home of the stars" but a seedy world of little people, some hopeful, some desparing, all twisted by their by their own desires--from the ironically romantic artist narrator to a macho movie cowboy, a middle-aged innocent from America's heartland, and the hard-as-nails call girl would-be-star whom they all lust after. An unforgettable portrayal of a world that mocks the real and rewards the sham, turns its back on love to plunge into empty sex, and breeds a savage violence that is its own undoing, this novel stands as a classic indictment of all that is most extravagant and uncontrolled in American life.
SYNOPSIS
The Day of the Locust focuses on the unglamorous side of Hollywood in the 1930's. Nathanael West worked in Hollywood from 1933 to his death in 1940 in a car accident, and his classic novel concentrates on a motley group of individuals who were marginalized in the entertainment capitial. The novel reflects West's cynicism of Hollywood, in which luck, and not talent, had more to do with success.