try this:
http://www.booksxyz.com/profile.php?bid=634399&x1=Y
this is one of the best damn books ever written, and as depressing as they come
from day of the locust
""Their boredom becomes more and more terrible. They realize they’ve been tricked and burn with resentment. Every day of their lives they read the newspapers and watched the movies. Both fed them on lynchings, murder, sex crimes, explosions, wrecks, love nests, fires, miracles, revolutions, wars. This daily diet made sophisticates of them." "
from miss lonelyhearts (in my opinion the better of the two)
"At college, and perhaps for a year afterwards, they had believed in literature, had believed in Beauty and in personal expression as an absolute end. When they lost this belief, they lost everything. Money and fame meant nothing to them. They were not worldly men." (from Miss Lonelyhearts, 1933)
from a review:
"MISS LONELYHEARTS (1933), an allegory of America as it struggled through the Depression. The tragic farce was published when West was just thirty. It depicts a male newspaper columnist, whose correspondence pen name is Miss Lonelyhearts. He writes his agony column in the New York Post-Dispatch daily newspaper. Shrike, the editor, is a kind of Satan and torments Miss Lonelyhearts, who has developed a Christ complex. Shrike says to him: "Explain that man cannot live by bread alone and give them stones." Miss Lonelyhearts is a therapist, priest and messiah to those alienated and in pain, such as a sixteen-year-old girl who was born without a nose: "I sit and look at myself all day and cry. I have a big hole in the middle of my face that scares people even myself so I can't blame the boys for not wanting to take me out. My mother loves me, but she cries terrible when she looks at me.""
wikipedia entry:
Nathanael West (October 17, 1903 - December 22, 1940) was the pen name of Nathan Wallenstein Weinstein.
Born in New York City, New York, West flunked Tufts University in 1921 and received an advanced degree from Brown in 1924. He spent the winter of 1925/26 in Paris writing The Dream Life of Balso Snell, his first novel, which was published in 1931. When he returned to the United States, he legally changed his name. He managed cheap New York hotels for his father until 1933, when he published what would become his best-known novel, Miss Lonelyhearts. In 1935 he went to Hollywood to become a screenwriter. His last novel was The Day of the Locust, published in 1939, the year before his death in an automobile accident, reportedly on the way to F. Scott Fitzgerald's funeral. He is buried in Mount Zion Cemetery in Queens, New York.
West was an innovative writer with a considerable influence on subsequent generations. His novels revealed the grotesqueness and sterility of the American Dream, especially its materialistic side. He was ostensibly surrealist in his outlook, as well. He never rose to any heights of fame while alive, but his popularity rose after his premature death."
i also highly highly reccomend "under the volcano" which i have gone into enough in other posts
