This book is often called the best book ever written about Hollywood. It is the story of set designer Tod Hackett & a cast of lowlifes living on the fringe of the movie business, all of them drawn to the same wannabe starlet. The characters are uniformly unsympathetic & it is nearly impossible to care what happens to them. Perhaps the book was more shocking when we knew less about the movie business & the personal lives of entertainers, but this tale of the dross behind the Silver Screen leaves one unmoved today. (Reviewed:) Grade: (C-) Tweet Websites:See also:General LiteratureModern Library Top 100 Novels of the 20th Century New York Public Library's Books of the Century The Hungry Mind Review's 100 Best 20th Century Books -Nathanael West (1903-1940) -ESSAY: Let This Be a Lesson to You: The Snakebit Life of Nathanael West (Gerald Howard, NY Times Book Review) -ESSAY: A Wasteland of Contradictions: The California Dreams of Nathanael West (Jim Tejani, Literary Traveler) -REVIEW: of NATHANAEL WEST: NOVELS AND OTHER WRITINGS True West: During the 1930s, a master of the short novel hallucinated a grotesque, erotic America we can recognize as our own (Virginia Heffernan) -F.W. Dupee: Doing West REVIEW: of Nathanael West: The Art of His Life by Jay Martin (NY Review of Books) -REVIEW: Nathanael West: Novels and Other Writings edited by Sacvan Bercovitch (Martin Filler, NY Review of Books) -REVIEW: Novels and Other Writings by Nathaneal West (Algis Valiunas, Commentary) If you liked The Day of the Locust, try: Roszak, Theodore
Salamon, Julie
Viertel, Peter
Wagner, Bruce
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