A Study Guide for Nathanael West's "The Day of the Locust"

By Gale and Cengage

A Study Guide for Nathanael West's "The Day of the Locust," excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Novels for Students. This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Novels for Students for all of your research needs.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cengage Learning - Gale
• Release date: Jun 15, 2016
• ISBN: 9781535836128

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The Day of the Locust

Nathanael West

1939

Introduction

The Day of the Locust, by Nathanael West, is set in 1930s Hollywood and follows the lives of a handful of people peripherally associated with the movie industry. Today, many critics consider it the best novel about Hollywood ever written, but it received little notice from the general public when it was released in 1939. According to Richard B. Gehman in his introduction to the 1976 reprint of the novel, many critics at the time considered the novel to be in bad taste.

The novel combines realistic features, such as characters who are flawed, with the artificial and surreal atmosphere of the movie industry. Tod Hackett, recently graduated from Yale University, is an illustrator and set designer for a film company. He lives in the same apartment building as Faye Greener, an aspiring and ambitious actress who will not date Tod because he is neither rich nor handsome. Through Faye, Tod meets a cast of seedy and sad characters whom he intends to include in his large painting, The Burning of Los Angeles. Tod's life is spent unsuccessfully pursuing Faye and imagining the violent scenes that will make up his painting.

Author Biography

Nathanael West was born Nathan Weinstein in New York City on October 17, 1903. (He legally changed his name in 1926.) West was the son of Jewish immigrants Max Weinstein, a prosperous building contractor, and Anna Wallenstein Weinstein. Mr. Weinstein wanted his son to go into the family business and gave Nathan copies of the Horatio Alger books, a series of novels in which honest young men do well for themselves in business. West, whose friends gave him the nickname Pep because he was so lazy, was uninterested in the typical trappings of upper middle-class success and dropped out of high school. He lied his way into Tufts University, which expelled him for poor grades, and then got himself admitted to Brown University by using someone else's transcripts. West graduated from Brown in 1924, where he was better known for his sense of humor and interest in parties than any scholarly abilities.

After finishing college, West spent two years in Paris, courtesy of his father. He was called back to the United States in 1927, as the family's contracting business was experiencing the first economic shudders that would become more widespread in 1929. West's family found him a series of jobs managing residential hotels so that he could earn a living. Through these jobs, West was able to provide many impoverished writers with rent-free places to stay in New York City and to meet many writers who would soon become famous, including Dashiell Hammett, Erskine Cald-well, Lillian Hellman, and S. J. Perelman, West's brother-in-law. West found the desperate lives of some of his tenants fascinating, and he was known