The Day of the Locust, Nathanael West, 1939. Considered one of the century’s best novels—it made the Modern Library 100—it is also regarded as one of the great novels about Hollywood, displaying the grimy underside and barely-restrained violence beneath the polished glamor of America’s dream mills. The novel portrays Tinseltown as a Golgotha, a place where dreams are manufactured but also where they are sent to die. A disappointed and frustrated populace, too long taunted by the illusions beamed from the silver screen, erupts onto the streets as a swarming mass of rioters. West worked as a screenwriter in the 1930s, and he absorbed the details and themes he would apply in his best known novel (the novella Miss Lonelyhearts [1933], a close second, is an expressionist black comedy set in New York, and an equally relentless depiction of a generation faced with repeated disappointment). Dorothy Parker found The Day of the Locust “brilliant, savage and arresting.” F. Scott Fitzgerald thought it “contained scenes of extraordinary power.” West died in a car crash with his wife the year after publication. The accident occurred the day after F. Scott Fitzgerald’s death (Fitzgerald’s unfinished Hollywood novel, The Last Tycoon, is often compared with The Day of the Locust). West, a notoriously poor driver, ran a stop sign, and some have suggested that he may have been fatally distracted by the grief he felt at Fitzgerald’s death. The Day of the Locust survives as his greatest achievement—though some may still prefer Miss Lonelyhearts—and its vision of the seamy belly of Hollywood, a land filled to capacity with confused, striving dreamers, endlessly denied the fame and glamor they seek, is no less relevant today than it was when it first appeared. (Bonus fact: the Simpsons animated television show adopted the name Homer Simpson from a sugar daddy character in West’s novel!)

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#82: Loving, Henry Green, 1945. Henry Green (Henry Vincent Yorke) is a dark horse among modern novelists. He never enjoyed placement in the first rank alongside Virginia Woolf, D.H. Lawrence, or James Joyce, though his novel Living (not to be confused with Loving) was included in Cyril Connolly’s greatly influential 1965 Modern Movement, which listed 100 works of poetry, fiction, and drama that made up the core of literary modernism in several languages. Praised in certain quarters during his life for his sparse and subtle depictions of working class life, Green has since fallen almost entirely out of favor (though Loving was included in the deeply unimaginative and flawed Time magazine top 100 novels, which inspired this shadow list). Penguin has reprinted several of his novels in a single volume, with an introduction by John Updike, but most readers will return a blank stare when you suggest that his writing has retained its power to move and intrigue us today. His alleged working-class background was, like Wilfrid Gibson’s, a complete fabrication, though this should not detract from his reputation as a sophisticated novelist of working class life. In fact, he worked on the floors of factories his family owned. Aside from his autobiographical book Pack My Bag, his novels tend to have one-word titles: Blindness (1926), Living (1929), Party Going (1939), Caught (1943), Back (1946), Concluding (1948), Nothing (1950), Doting (1952). I picked up my own copies of his novels when the Philadelphia Atheneum placed them in the foyer on their deaccession cart. Loving is set on an English estate in Ireland during the Second World War. Ireland, which remained neutral during the war, had some German sympathies (my enemy’s enemy is my friend), and the estate’s inhabitants, set apart from the local population, are alternately drawn to the Irish (as lovers) and repelled by them (as potential mobs). The English working-class servants of the manor are forced to fend for themselves without their “masters” when the English aristocrats are called off either to fight in the officer corp or visit family in England. They are compelled to continue the routines for an empty house, and it soon becomes clear that the very routines, emptied of their meanings, are the only thing that keeps them from falling into a state of complete anarchy. The ending is a terrific, and rather strange, stroke on Green’s part. A highly recommended book, analyzing a teetering English class system from below.

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My Life as a Man, Philip Roth, 1974. Like many unabashedly ambitious novelists, Roth can be dazzling and exasperating by turns, sometimes, like Faulkner, simultaneously. There is little question that he is one of the best living American novelists, and his recent enshrinement in the Library of America series (very few living authors warrant inclusion) seems to cement his case. I decided on a novel that displays Roth’s easy brilliance and great emotional and comic range but which is not one of his better-known books (Portnoy’s Complaint and American Pastoral seem to hold these positions, and My Life as a Man meets these very different books midway). The novel really consists of three books. The first section, “Useful Fictions,” contains two short stories about a character named Nathan Zuckerman (who will star in another series of Roth books, though the Zuckerman of “Useful Fictions” is not an exact biographical match to the later Zuckerman). A young novelist named Peter Tarnopol is the author.

The twin stories share many similarities but showcase two very different attitudes: in one, the triumphant, brilliant young writer encounters difficulties and overcomes them to become stronger, never wavering in his belief in his own powers; in the second, the young writer encounters problems (largely with women) and succumbs, losing himself in a Lolita-like entanglement that ends with his exile to Italy and the dissolution of his creative powers. The third section of the novel, the lion’s share, “My True Life,” is excruciating and quite funny. Roth’s alter-ego Tarnapol (who wrote the first two parts) describes his promising beginnings and his disastrous, nearly deadly relationship with the brilliantly (and some might think misogynistically) drawn Maureen (inspired by Roth’s own relationship with Margaret Martinson). Through the vividly evoked lovers’ quarrels (these are really better described as nuclear escalations and exchanges), Tarnopol agonizes over his own responsibility for the failed marriage, weathering barrages of accusations and condolences from his therapist, who may well be mad himself. The real focus and meat of the novel is a consideration of the ways in which one’s life affect one’s art, but the book is a roller coaster of insane bickering and public displays of romantic hatred. Highly recommended!

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Number 85 on our top 100 countdown: Native Son, Richard Wright, 1940. A gripping, scathing, infuriating novel. Arnold Rampersad described Bigger Thomas, the sullen young murderer at the center of the novel, as the least likable main character in all of American literature, which is saying something. Wright’s novel was selected as the Book-of-the-Month and sold hundreds of thousands of copies in its first month, before readers realized that it was not a crime thriller but a provocative analysis of race and violence. The novel is flawed, and Wright himself may have known it. The prolonged court-room scenes at the novel’s end serve largely to counterpoint opposing political forces, the Marxist liberal lawyer, who claims that Bigger Thomas’s crimes extend naturally from an unjust society and the reactionary lawyer, who claims that Thomas’s crimes cannot be justified by any social conditions, however dire, and must be punished to the fullest extent of the law, which is the death penalty. Native Son was overshadowed for many years by Ralph Ellison’s more literary novel Invisible Man, which was justifiably seen as the superior novel, synthesizing modernism and naturalism. In the 1960s, the radicalism that spread across the country threw new light on the extreme themes of Wright’s novel and brought it back into the mainstream. It now seems to be required reading for angry young men and women alike.

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Number 86 on our top 100 countdown: Winesburg, Ohio, Sherwood Anderson (1919). This is a book that has fallen on hard times. Upon its debut, it was considered a bold and even shocking addition to the naturalist style in American letters. Anderson was hailed as a genius for his portraits of troubled, unstable, yearning small-town Americans, and it was thought that he was a “primitive” writer of the best sort, instinctual, raw, able to tap into the murky Freudian depths that run beneath the facade of daily life. He supported and heavily influenced four major American novelists, Steinbeck, Hemingway, Thomas Wolff, and Faulkner, all of whom spurned and even ridiculed him (Hemingway’s second commercially published book, The Torrents of Spring, is a vicious parody of Anderson). Anderson created a myth about himself that seems to have stuck. According to his version of events, at age 36 he was suddenly stunned into silence while dictating a banal letter to his secretary at the paint manufacturing company where he worked. He suffered what was then called a nervous breakdown and simply walked off to the east. He described it as “escaping from his materialistic existence,” and this has made him a hero for generations of would-be writers who feel trapped in mundane but secure lives.

Anderson came to sit at the center of any consideration of twentieth-century American fiction, largely on the merits of the collection Winesburg, Ohio, a series of interconnected short stories that may by read as a novel. Then matters took a turn for the worse. Anderson was unable to repeat the success of his breakthrough collection (though some think the later Death in the Woods is actually his most accomplished collection). His proteges cruelly parodied the style he created. The great critic Lionel Trilling drubbed Winesburg, Ohio. Later, Susan Sontag managed to drive the last nail into Anderson’s coffin by saying “it’s okay to laugh at him again.” Irving Howe has attempted to restore Anderson’s reputation, but Winesburg, Ohio, once considered an American classic, continues to wallow in undeserved obscurity. Anderson set the trend for unusual, troubled characters, the “twisted apples,” and the hidden, dark drives that lurk behind the myths of “normal” life. His influence has been enormous, even if he is no longer fashionable. Perhaps he is ready for a comeback!

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