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What “Miss Lonelyhearts” Teaches Us About How To Live
Analyzing Nathaniel West’s masterpiece and our collective, existential nightmare.
In 1931, in the throes of the Great Depression and at the conclusion of the Jazz Age, Nathanael West wrote Miss Lonelyhearts, his “remorseless masterpiece.” (1) To some critics, West’s novel surpasses well-known literary classics, like The Great Gatsby and Sanctuary, in “forming a lucid indictment of the failure of popular imagination to encompass the Great Depression’s dismantling of the American Dream.” (2)
How did West manage to compete with the likes of F. Scott Fitzgerald and Faulkner in a mere fifty-eight pages?
Among many possible explanations, it is because West creates a universe cynically reflective of America, a world of characters that are frighteningly American in their suffering and desperation. These characters are pitiable, not just because of physical circumstances, but because they are alienated from America and from themselves.
It is because West relentlessly scrapes against this reality in our modern world of technology and mass communication that he is able to access the most basic, most tragic element of the human condition: the existential crisis.