Sanderson holds a master of fine arts degree in fiction writing and is an independent writer. In this essay, Sanderson examines images of nature, impotence, and violence in West's The Day of the Locust, and how they relate to the novel's curious title.

West's final novel before his death, The Day of the Locust, immediately presents the reader with a question: What does this curious title refer to? Even after a person reads the book, the title's appropriateness to the novel's contents may not be immediately apparent. There are no locusts in the book and, in fact, nature as it is commonly perceived seems to have been almost completely left out of West's image of a city defined by artificiality.

The most famous literary or historical reference to locusts is in the book of Exodus in the Bible, in which God sends a plague of locusts to...