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".

The collected works of Nathanael West

Literature & Fiction

Nathanael. West

Classics

Penguin Books, Ltd.

West's novels are a deliberate assault on the common man's notion of reality; for violence is not only his subject matter, but also his technique... In no writer is there so absolute a sense of misery of being human, though he also believes that such misery is a more proper occasion for laughter than tears...

Miss Lonelyhearts & the Day of the Locust

Contemporary

New Directions

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...

Day of the Locust

Literary

Penguin Books, Limited (UK)

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.

Miss Lonelyhearts: Or the Dismantling of Lemuel Pitkin (Penguin Modern Classics)

With an Introduction and Notes by Henry Claridge, Senior Lecturer, School of English, University of Kent at Canterbury. The four novels gathered here constitute the complete longer works of one the most brilliant and original American writers. West’s vision of American modernity is terrifyingly comical and diagnoses the tawdriness and meretriciousness of much of American popular culture. His greatest work, Miss Lonelyhearts, which begins this collection, is unique in modern literature. It describes New York in the early years of the Great Depression through the point of view of an ‘agony aunt’ who corresponds with his suffering readers in the guise of Miss Lonelyhearts: ‘(Are you in trouble? – Do you need advice?)’. A Cool Million is, as its subtitle suggests, the ‘dismantling’ of a myth, here a caustic satire of the ‘rags to riches’ story. West’s final novel, The Day of the Locust, is a comic, yet apocalyptic account of the fantasies of 1930s Hollywood. This volume concludes with West’s parodic and surreal first venture into fiction, The Dream Life of Balso Snell. Henry Claridge’s introduction to this new edition of West’s fictional writings contextualises his work in the United States of the Great Depression, in his evocation of 1930s Hollywood (where he worked as a writer of screenplays), and in the larger context of his Eastern European Jewish background, and, particularly, his reading of Dostoyesvky. The text comes with extensive annotations, a note on the textual history of West’s writings, and a guide to further reading for both the student and the general reader.

Complete Works of Nathanael West (Picador Classics)

Pan Books, Ltd.

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."

A Cool Million and The Dream Life of Balso Snell: Two Novels

United States

Farrar. Straus and Giroux

The Complete Works of Nathanael West: The Dream Life of Balso Snell; Miss Lonelyhearts; A Cool Million; The Day of the Locust.

Farrar, Straus & Cudahy, New York

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.

The Day of the Locust

Signet Classics

"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."

Miss Lonelyhearts and The Day of the Locust (Modern Library)

Modern Library

Two short novels, one set in New York and the other in Hollywood, dramatically depict the extremes of the human condition and the destructive forces pervading modern American life

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Nathanael. West. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Nathanael. West

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Nathanael. West. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

The collected works of Nathanael West

Miss Lonelyhearts & the Day of the Locust

Day of the Locust

Miss Lonelyhearts: Or the Dismantling of Lemuel Pitkin (Penguin Modern Classics)

Complete Works of Nathanael West (Picador Classics)

A Cool Million and The Dream Life of Balso Snell: Two Novels

The Complete Works of Nathanael West: The Dream Life of Balso Snell; Miss Lonelyhearts; A Cool Million; The Day of the Locust.

The Day of the Locust

Miss Lonelyhearts and The Day of the Locust (Modern Library)

Miss Lonelyhearts & the Day of the Locust