The Day of the Locust
1939 first edition cover
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| Author | Nathanael West |
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| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
| Genre | Novel |
| Publisher | Random House |
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Publication date
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May 16, 1939 |
| Media type | Print (Hardcover, Paperback) |
| Pages | 238 pp |
| ISBN | |
| OCLC | 22865781 |
The Day of the Locust is a 1939 novel by American author Nathanael West set in Hollywood, California. The novel follows a young artist from the Yale School of Fine Arts named Tod Hackett. who has been hired by a Hollywood studio to do scenic design and painting. While he works he plans an important painting to be called "The Burning of Los Angeles," a portrayal of the chaotic and fiery holocaust which will destroy the city. While the cast of characters Tod befriends are a conglomerate of Hollywood stereotypes, his greater discovery is a part of society whose "eyes filled with hatred," and "had come to California to die." This undercurrent of society captures the despair of Americans who worked and saved their entire lives only to realize, too late, that the American dream was more illusive than they imagine. Their anger boils into rage, and the craze over the latest Hollywood premier erupts violently into mob rule and absolute chaos.
In the introduction to The Day of the Locust, Richard Gehman writes, the novel was "more ambitious" than Miss Lonelyhearts, and "showed marked progress in West's thinking and in his approach toward maturity as a writer." Gehman calls the novel "episodic in structure, but panoramic in form."
West's characters are intentionally shallow, stereotyped, and "derive from all the B-grade genre films of the period" (Simon, 523). They are what Light calls "grotesques". Tod Hackett's first name is a derivative of the German word for death, and his last name refers to a common epithet for Hollywood screenwriters and artists, who were pejoratively called "hacks." In the first chapter of the novel, the narrative voice announces: "Yes, despite his appearance, Tod was really a very complicated young man with a whole set of personalities, one inside the other like a nest of Chinese boxes."
Tod Hackett is the novel's protagonist. He moves from the east coast to Hollywood, California in search of inspiration for his next painting. The novel is set in the 1930s during the Great Depression. Most of the characters exist at the fringes of the Hollywood film industry, but Hollywood is merely the backdrop for Tod Hackett's revelation. Tod is employed by a Hollywood studio "to learn set and costume designing." During his spare time, Tod sketches scenes he observes on large production sets and studio back lots. The novel details Tod's observation of the filming of the Battle of Waterloo. His goal is to find inspiration for the picture he is getting ready to begin, a work titled "The Burning of Los Angeles."
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