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[Rev. Rye]

The Collected Works of Nathanael West.



Nathanael West has been one of my favourite authors since I picked up the paperback editions of his four novellas in my senior year of high school.

The Four Novellas:

• The Dream Life of Balso Snell: A poet hides out in the colon of the Trojan Horse and wanders around and meets several strange characters. Easily the weakest of the four novellas.
  
• Miss Lonelyhearts: A novel about a young man with a Christ complex getting a job as an agony aunt. He is a Christ figure, and gets all the rejection that entails. He doesn't even have real apostles.
  
• A Cool Million: Lemuel Pitkin's family needs to pay their mortgage, and, on the advice from ex-president Shagpoke Whipple, he sets out into the world to make a fortune in a parody of the novels of Horatio Alger. He fails miserably. Reading this, and seeing how much Whipple reminds me of him makes me wish he hooked up with W.C. Fields during his time in Hollywood...
  
• The Day of the Locust: A longitudinal look at people on the fringes of Hollywood in the 1930s.
  

I got a First Edition of a "Collected Novels" edition from the 1950s as a present for my graduation from Columbia, and more recently, I found an edition of his complete works, including all four novellas, some nonfiction, a few unpublished short stories, plays, and even a couple letters.

10/10.