Product Description

The first comprehensive, authoritative edition of the work of America's prince of black humor and social satire includes his most famous novels of the thirties, along with his poetry, essays, plays, film scripts, and letters."

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #311560 in Books
• Published on: 1997-08-01
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 840 pages

Amazon.com Review
In 1940, when an automobile accident prematurely claimed Nathanael West's life, he was a relatively obscure writer, the author of only four short novels. West's reputation has grown considerably since then and he is now considered one of the 20th century's major authors. This superb volume, edited by Sacvan Bercovitch, compiles all of West's novels and a great number of other documents, including stories, plays, and letters. Novels and Other Writings is the most complete West now available in a single volume. Film buffs will be particularly fascinated by Miss Lonelyhearts, which served as the basis for two intriguing movies and The Day of the Locust, West's final novel, which many consider to be the most withering attack on Hollywood ever written. Among the papers included in this collection are a never-filmed screenplay, Before the Fact, and a screen treatment of West's novel A Cool Million.

From Library Journal
When he was just 37, West?and his wife?died in a car wreck while rushing home from a hunting trip to attend the wake of fellow novelist and screenwriter Scott Fitzgerald, who died unexpectedly the previous day. The two friends were waked in adjoining rooms at the same Los Angeles funeral home. This volume combines West's novels?The Dream Life of Balso Snell, Miss Lonelyhearts, A Cool Million, and The Day of the Locusts, considered by many to be the best novel about Hollywood ever written?the play Good Hunting, plus a screenplay, some shorter fictional pieces, and a selection of his letters. If your collection is shamefully lacking in West, this splendid volume gives you virtually his entire career. One of the finest collections of the year.
Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Kirkus Reviews
``Forget the epic, the masterwork,'' Nathanael West said. ``In America. . . families have no history. Leave slow growth to the book reviewers, you only have time to explode.'' In retrospect, it seems to have made sense for West to have been in such a hurry. In quick succession he hurled four incendiary novels at the literary establishment, beginning in 1931 with The Dream Life of Balso Snell and continuing with Miss Lonelyhearts, A Cool Million, and his masterpiece, The Day of the Locust. He died soon after finishing the book, in a traffic accident, at the age of 37. West seemed a unique figure in the 1930s, writing novels that mixed ferocious satire of the American establishment and the hustling, hypocritical spirit of capitalism with bawdy humor and a grim, unblinking view of the manner in which irrationality overwhelms logic and the best intentions. This Library of America volume, reprinting the novels along with screenplays, short stories, essays, and some wonderfully pungent letters, demonstrates that not much has changed: West is still a satirist with few peers and no betters, and a writer of bleak, haunting power. -- Copyright ©1997, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Customer Reviews

Of Greater Academic than Casual Interest
Little known during his lifetime, Nathanael West is today considered one of the 20th Century's most influential authors, a writer whose pitch-black satires focus on the emptiness of an American society choking on its own regurgitated mythology. His reputation rests squarely upon two works: MISS LONELYHEARTS, the tale of a newspaper advice columnist who is overwhelmed by the tragedies of those who write to him for advice, and THE DAY OF THE LOCUST, a savage vision of American society turning upon the illusions fosted upon them by a Hollywood mentality.

Both MISS LONELYHEARTS and LOCUST are powerful works, every bit as vital and unnerving today as when they were first published in the 1930s; I recommend both very strongly. But the remainder of West's cannon is extremely problematic. Like the little girl with the curl, when West was good he was very, very good, and when he was bad he was horrid. And with its inclusion of his lesser writings, this Library of America anthology gives us a detailed tour of the latter.

THE DREAM LIFE OF BALSO SNELL, West's first novel, was an experimental tale that parodies intellectual pretentions through religious, mythological, and aesthetic motifs--but while it has a number of fascinating ideas and conceits, it is at best an interesting failure. A COOL MILLION, West's third novel, is a satire on the Horatio Alger myth; it is considerably more readable than SNELL, but it lags far behind both LONELYHEARTS and LOCUST.

The rest of the anthology consists of a failed Broadway play, an unfilmed screenplay, unpublished stories and fragments, juvenalia, and personal letters. Both the play and screenplay--GOOD HUNTING and BEFORE THE FACT respectively--are written very much against the grain; it is not difficult to see why the play failed and director Hitchcock (who filmed BEFORE THE FACT as SUSPICION) ordered a completely new script. The remaining items are mediocre at best, dire at worst, and although West's letters are interesting from a historical standpoint they have no literary merit per se.

West's life was cut short by an automobile accident just as he seemed to be finding his true voice, and it is interesting to speculate on how his writing might have developed if he had lived to write more. This is an important collection--but it's importance is largely of an academic nature rather than a literary one, of more interest to the serious student of American literature than to a casual reader. If you fall into the latter catagory, I strongly recommend that you read MISS LONELYHEARTS and DAY OF THE LOCUST (both of which are available in inexpensive editions) rather than purchase this particular volume--and only after, if you like so many others among us find yourself fascinated by West's work, contemplate purchase of this anthology.

hard work by Harvard grad students
Thanks to the efforts of a bunch of Harvard grad students, this is the only book you need to become a cocktail party expert on Nathanael West (born Nathan Weinstein, 1903; died in Hollywood in 1940). My favorite part of the book is the capsule biography in the back. He drops out of high school (like me!) and alters his transcript to get into Tufts. He flunks out of Tufts but gets hold of a transcript for another Nathan Weinstein, who was apparently a pretty good student. He uses this to get into Brown and becomes an Ivy League graduate in 1924.

Oh yes, the writing... West's prose could easily pass for a New Yorker story circa 1985. Furthermore, his characters behave a lot like our contemporaries. None of this struck me as remarkable but I think it accounts for why he was so widely admired by good writers of his day and so roundly ignored by readers during the 1930s (perhaps 6,000 copies of his books were sold during his lifetime). Even if his writing style hadn't been so modern, releasing the bleak Miss Lonelyhearts in 1933 cannot have been an inspired marketing idea (the publisher went bankrupt just as the book was released).

If you want to read just one West novel, my personal choice would be Day of the Locust (1939), his last work. It is about the people destroyed by their dreams of California and Hollywood, seen through the eyes of a journeyman studio artist. He's obsessed with an aspiring actress, Faye Greener: "Her invitation wasn't to pleasure, but to struggle, hard and sharp, closer to murder than to love. If you threw yourself on her, it would be like throwing yourself from the parapet of a skyscraper. You would do it with a scream. You couldn't expect to rise again. Your teeth would be driven into your skull like nails into a pine board and your back would be broken. You wouldn't even have time to sweat or close your eyes."

The strangest novel in the collection is A Cool Million, wherein a Candide-like young man, Lemuel Pitkin, goes out to make his fortune in what a variety of Panglosses keep telling him is the Land of Opportunity. As in a Horatio Alger story, Pitkin meets a lot of rich and powerful men who are in a position to help him. West departs from Alger in that Pitkin is cheated and mutilated by all of his encounters with the rest of humanity.

The man who burned Los Angeles
The quartet of piquant short novels Nathanael West had published by the time he died in a car accident at the age of thirty-seven occupy a unique niche in American literature. A Hollywood screenwriter who migrated from studio to studio in search of sustenance, West was a humorist with a warped conscience, a young man who had fraudulently gained admission to Brown University and probably belonged there anyway, an intellectual misfit trying to make a living and a name for himself in a glitzy industry. Like Kafka with a comic-strip aesthetic, West saw the world and the people around him as the tortured products of an insane creator, cartoons to be stretched, punched, and mutilated.

"Few things are sadder than the truly monstrous," West observes in "The Day of the Locust," the last of his novels, which made an indelible impression upon me when I first read it a few years ago. Ironically, sadness is definitely not the note he strikes in his portrayal of a congregation of hilarious cretins who populate the fringes of 1930s Hollywood; it is a very brash and "loud" novel, but incredibly it is more refined and less outrageous than its three predecessors. The surrealistic narrative of "The Dream Life of Balso Snell," by contrast, is not to be read with a queasy stomach. The unassuming Mr. Snell happens upon a giant wooden horse--apparently the same the ancient Greeks used to infiltrate Troy--and, entering through the posterior, finds the intestines inhabited by unhinged writers in search of an audience.

In "Miss Lonelyhearts," the title character (who is a man) is an advice columnist for a newspaper, unable to muster anything better than empty platitudes in response to tearful letters from barely literate and improbably pathetic losers who are mostly beyond help. He is not, however, doing this just as a hoax; he approaches his role soberly because the trust his correspondents place in him forces him to "examine the values by which he lives." If "Miss Lonelyhearts" seems farcical, consider how accurately it prophesies the Jerry Springer era of televised dirty laundry and voluntary public embarrassment.

"A Cool Million" is a relentlessly cruel Horatio Alger parody that follows the misadventures of Lemuel Pitkin, a Vermont boy who goes to New York to try to make a fortune in order to save his mother's house from foreclosure but is foiled continually as he encounters an endless procession of human sleaze: corrupt businessmen, brutish cops, brothel operators and their clientele, rapists, thieves, and con men. (The screen story West wrote for "A Cool Million"--a project never filmed--is understandably so much cleaner and more optimistic that it hardly resembles the original novel.)

The four novels combined constitute only half of the Library of America volume, the rest of which includes miscellaneous fragments, plays, and letters. Among the detritus are the unsuccessful play "Good Hunting," a relatively conventional satire of war and war correspondence, an unfilmed screenplay based on Francis Iles's novel "Before the Fact" (a different screenplay by another author was used by the studio instead, and was filmed by Alfred Hitchcock as "Suspicion"), and a college essay praising Euripides to the stars. This juxtaposition effectively illuminates the two dichotomous worlds of West--the true artist and the commercial hack, the grotesque emerging from the mundane.