Surrealism Gone West : from The Dream Life of Balso Snell (1931) to Miss Lonelyhearts (1933)

Abstract

In 1950, ten years after Nathanael West died in a car accident, American publishing company New Directions reissued The Day of the Locust, West's eye-catching novel about Hollywood. His literary legacy had gone relatively unnoticed since his death, but this sudden revival made him gain a fairly large body of readers who had much more curiosity and relish for his various kinds of social grotesquerie, black comedy and hysteric pessimism than their predecessors during the Depression years. Upon this growing craze for West's resuscitated materials, American book company Farrar, Straus and Cudahy Inc.