Nathanael West wrote four novels, The Dream Life of Balso Snell (1931), Miss Lonelyhearts (1933), A Cool Million: The Dismantling of Lemuel Pitkin (1934), and The Day of the Locust (1939), a play, Good Hunting , with Joseph Schrank, and a smattering of poetry and essays. The dominant theme in West's novels is degeneration of religion, sex, and art in a decaying society. Unlike many other social novelists, West, however, blamed the individuals, not their institutions, for society's decline. All around him he saw hypocrisy, lack of communication, the failure of love to heal. He saw the garish, bizarre, erotic, and grotesque replacing the standard criteria for defining a work of art. The result, he believed, is chaos, a natural concomitant of life and a sure road to the destruction of humankind.

West's friend Isadore Kapstein said that "to be an artist served West in three ways: 1) in fiction he could discharge all...