The Day of the Locust
by Nathanael West
Summary
Tod Hackett, a Yale trained painter working as a set designer in Depression era Hollywood, spends his days sketching the desperate hangers on drawn to the industry's edges while planning a vast canvas he intends to call The Burning of Los Angeles. He falls for Faye Greener, an aspiring actress with real beauty and no discernible talent who treats Tod as a convenience while chasing wealthier or more glamorous men instead, and he watches, half fascinated and half sickened, as she drifts among a cast of Hollywood strays: a dwarf bookie named Abe Kusich, a cynical screenwriter named Claude Estee, and Homer Simpson, a repressed former Iowa accountant whose hands seem to move without his permission. A cruel child performer named Adore Loomis torments Homer until Homer beats him savagely at a crowded movie premiere outside a Hollywood picture palace, and the crowd's excitement curdles instantly into a riot. Tod, caught inside the mob as it surges and crushes around him, lives out the exact vision of mass violence he had only imagined for his painting, the novel closing as he is swept up by police, half laughing, half breaking down, unable to tell his own voice from the sirens around him.
West writes in a compressed, almost cinematic style, quick scenes cut together rather than a conventional plot developed at length, and the effect sits closer to satire sharpened into nightmare than to straightforward social realism. It reads briskly and grows steadily more disturbing, its early comedy about failed actors and fake cowboys curdling by the final chapters into something close to prophecy about the mob violence simmering underneath Hollywood's glamour.
West died in a car accident in December 1940, only a year and a half after the novel's publication, before its reputation had any real chance to grow; the crash also killed his wife, Eileen, and came one day after the death of his friend F. Scott Fitzgerald.
Historical Context & Significance
Random House published The Day of the Locust in May 1939, and it sold poorly, fewer than fifteen hundred copies in its first run, a commercial failure that matched the fate of West's earlier novels. No prize took notice of it, and its reputation only began to turn in the 1950s, more than a decade after West's death, once critics started reassessing his entire small body of work.
The novel is now ranked among the finest satirical portraits of the American film industry ever written, placed on the Modern Library's list of the century's hundred best English language novels and included in Harold Bloom's Western Canon. John Schlesinger's 1975 film adaptation, starring Donald Sutherland as Homer and Karen Black as Faye, brought the story to a much wider audience than West's own lifetime ever gave it, decades after the crash that kept him from seeing any of it happen.