by Nathanael West (1939 AD)
The Day of the Locust is a satire in the Juvenal vein, in which is put on display the plain hollowness and general degeneracy of 1930s Hollywood. The most striking aspect of the novel now, over eighty years later, is that it seems to be a true example of that which is so often falsely claimed in the literary world. Namely, it was a book truly ahead of its time — it was published, for example, forty years before Less Than Zero, itself a book that seems to remain relevant forty years after publication. The Day of the Locust proves that all our quips and qualms about Hollywood being unoriginal and degenerate are themselves unoriginal and derivative. What emits from that place is obvious, hollowing, and has been put to paper for generations.