Novels & Other Writings - Library of America (2025)

Novels & Other Writings - Library of America (1)

Nathanael West: Novels & Other Writings

The Dream Life of Balso Snell | Miss Lonelyhearts | A Cool Million | The Day of the Locust | screenplays and correspondence More

Edited by Sacvan Bercovitch

“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.” — Library Journal

Overview
Table of Contents

Overview

In this volume the Library of America offers the most complete literary portrait ever published of Nathanael West. Along with the four novels for which he is famous, this authoritative collection gathers his work in other genres, including stories, poetry, essays and plays, film scripts and treatments, and letters.
When West died in a California highway accident in 1940 at the age of thirty-seven, his originality and brilliance were little known outside an intensely admiring circle of fellow writers: William Carlos Williams, Edmund Wilson, S. J. Perelman, and others. Not until West’s four novels were reissued in the late 1950s was he acknowledged as one of the most gifted writers of his generation. His masterpieces Miss Lonelyhearts and The Day of the Locust, with their blending of manic farce and despairing compassion, and their vision of an America awash in its own mass-produced fantasies, read like a prophecy of much that was to come in American literature and life.
Each of West’s novels is distinct in style and theme. In the Dada-inspired The Dream Life of Balso Snell (1931), he freely mixes high-flown literary and religious allusions with erotic and scatological humor. Miss Lonelyhearts (1933) presents, in a series of grotesque, starkly etched episodes, the spiritual breakdown of a newspaper columnist overwhelmed by his readers’ suffering. By contrast, A Cool Million (1934) reduces the eternal optimism of Horatio Alger’s novels to a brutal, cartoonish farce. In his last work, The Day of the Locust (1939), West renders with hallucinatory precision the reverse side of the Hollywood dream, as he choreographs a cast of failures, has-beens, and deluded glamour-seekers in what becomes an apocalyptic dance of death.
Also included is a generous sampling of West’s other surviving work, ranging from freewheeling improvisations and grotesque comic tales to more mainstream work written with Hollywood or Broadway in mind, and including his anti-war satire Good Hunting and his adaptation of Francis Ile’s famous crime novel Before the Fact. The uncollected West shows him as a writer who embodied the contradictions and crazy-quilt exuberance of American culture—and raises the question of how he might have developed had his career not been cut short. Selected correspondence with William Carlos Williams, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Malcolm Cowley, Bennett Cerf, and others rounds out the volume and sets West’s literary life in fuller context.
Sacvan Bercovitch (1933–2014), volume editor, was the 2007 recipient of the Bode-Pearson Prize for Lifetime Achievement in American Studies, the author of The Puritan Origins of the American Self, and editor of the multi-volume Cambridge History of American Literature.
This Library of America series edition is printed on acid-free paper and features Smyth-sewn binding, a full cloth cover, and a ribbon marker.
This volume is available for adoption in the Guardian of American Letters Fund.

See Also
NOVELS AND OTHER WRITINGS The Novels of Nathanael West Nathanael West | Encyclopedia.com Nathanael West - New World Encyclopedia
Table of Contents

The Dream Life of Balso Snell
Miss Lonelyhearts
A Cool Million
The Day of the Locust
Other Writings
Euripides—A Playwright
“Through the Hole in the Mundane Millstone”
Some Notes on Violence
Some Notes on Miss L
Business Deal
Soft Soap for the Barber
Unpublished Writings and Fragments
The Imposter
Western Union Boy
Mr. Potts of Pottstown
The Adventurer
Three Eskimos
Burn the Cities
Tibetan Night
Proposal to the Guggenheim Foundation
Good Hunting, A Play in Three Acts
Before the Fact, A Screen Play
“A Cool Million”: A Screen Story
Untitled Outline
Letters
To Beatrice Matheiu, April 12, 1930
To The New York World-Telegram, October 20, 1931
To William Carlos Williams, late 1931
To Milton Abernethy, April 26, 1932
To William Carlos Williams, c. April 1932
To William Carlos Williams, May 13, 1932
To Minna and Milton Abernethy, February 17, 1933
To Minna and Milton Abernethy, March 24, 1933
To Minna and Milton Abernethy, April 11, 1933
To Minna and Milton Abernethy, May? 1933
To Edmund Wilson, July 25, 1933
To Minna and Milton Abernethy, July 27, 1933
To F. Scott Fitzgerald, September 11, 1934
To Bennett Cerf, May? 1934
To Bennett Cerf, June 7, 1938
To Bennett Cerf, July 11, 1938
To Josephine Conway, September 19, 1938
To Josephine Conway, October 21, 1938
To Bennett Cerf, January 6, 1939
To Saxe Commins, February 14, 1939
To F. Scott Fitzgerald, April 5, 1939
To Edmund Wilson, April 6, 1939
To Malcolm Cowley, May 11, 1939
To F. Scott Fitzgerald, June 30, 1939
To Edmund Wilson, June 30, 1939
To Bob Brown, February 14, 1940
To Bennett Cerf, February 14, 1940
To Bennett Cerf, March 11, 1940
To Bennett Cerf, March 30, 1940

Novels & Other Writings - Library of America (2025)

References