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1939 novel by Nathanael West
the film based on the book

The Day of the Locust is a 1939 novel by American author Nathanael West set in Hollywood, California. The novel follows a young artist from the Yale School of Fine Arts named Tod Hackett, who has been hired by a Hollywood studio to do scene design and painting. While he works he plans an important painting to be called "The Burning of Los Angeles", a portrayal of the chaotic and fiery holocaust which will destroy the city. While the cast of characters Tod befriends are a conglomerate of Hollywood stereotypes, his greater discovery is a part of society whose "eyes filled with hatred", and "had come to California to die". This undercurrent of society captures the despair of Americans who worked and saved their entire lives only to realize, too late, that the American dream was more elusive than they imagine. Their anger boils into rage, and the craze over the latest Hollywood premiere erupts violently into mob rule and absolute chaos. In the introduction to The Day of the Locust, Richard Gehman writes that the novel was "more ambitious" than West's previous novel Miss Lonelyhearts, and "showed marked progress in West's thinking and in his approach toward maturity as a writer." Gehman calls the novel "episodic in structure, but panoramic in form". They are what Light calls "grotesques". In the first chapter of the novel, the narrative voice announces: "Yes, despite his appearance, Tod was really a very complicated young man with a whole set of personalities, one inside the other like a nest of Chinese boxes." During his spare time, Tod sketches scenes he observes on large production sets and studio back lots. The novel details Tod's observation of the filming of the Battle of Waterloo. His goal is to find inspiration for the painting he is getting ready to begin, a work titled "The Burning of Los Angeles." Tod falls in love with Faye Greener, an aspiring starlet who lives nearby but Faye only loves men who are good looking or wealthy. She is beautiful but lacks the acting talent to progress beyond roles as an extra. Tod is simply a "good hearted man," the kind Faye likes. He imagines that loving her would compare to jumping from a skyscraper and screaming to the ground. Tod wants to "throw himself [at her], no matter what the cost." Throughout the novel, Tod fantasizes about having a sexual encounter with Faye as an act of rape. Every time he imagines raping her, reality interrupts his fantasy before he can complete the act. Scenes are interrupted prior to their climax frequently throughout the novel. A patron jokes that it is "the old teaser routine," when a pornographic film viewing at Mrs. Jenning's parlor ends unexpectedly due to technical difficulties. Between his work at the studio and his introduction to Faye's friends, Tod interacts with numerous Hollywood hangers on. Characters like Abe Kusich, the dwarf; Claude Estee, the successful screenwriter; and Earle Shoop, the fake California cowboy, all of whom have difficulty changing their personas from the characters they play to who they are. As a result, there is a clear sense of acting and fakery that spills beyond the confines of Hollywood studios and into the streets of Los Angeles. Shortly after moving into a neighborhood in the valley, Tod befriends Homer Simpson, a simple minded bookkeeper from Iowa who moved to California for health reasons. Homer Simpson's "unruly hands" operate independently from his body, and their movements are often mechanical. "They demanded special attention, had always demanded it." When Homer attempts to escape California he is distracted not only by the crowd but his inability to leave the street despite Tod's help and insistent encouragement. A neighbor's son, the child actor Adore Loomis finds Homer and torments him until Homer violently lashes out against the boy. The novel's climactic riot ensues and the chaos surrounding the latest Hollywood premiere turns violent outside Mr. Khan's Pleasure Dome. Tod vividly revises "The Burning of Los Angeles" in his mind, while being pushed around in the human waves of the riot. The final scene plays out, uninterrupted. The conclusion of the novel can be read as a moment of epiphany and mental clarity for the artist, or a complete "mental breakdown" and Tod's "incorporation into the mechanized, modern world of Los Angeles."

The original title of the novel was The Cheated. The title of West's work may be a biblical allusion to the Old Testament. Susan Sanderson writes: 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 the pharaoh of Egypt as retribution for refusing to free the enslaved Jews. Millions of locusts swarm over the lush fields of Egypt, destroying its food supplies. Destructive locusts also appear in the New Testament in the symbolic and apocalyptic book of Revelation. West's use of "locust" in his title evokes images of destruction and a land stripped bare of anything green and living. The novel is filled with images of destruction: Tod Hackett's painting entitled "The Burning of Los Angeles," his violent fantasies about Faye and the bloody result of the cockfight. A close examination of West's characters and his selective use of natural images, which include representations of violence and impotence — and which are therefore contrary to popular images linking nature and fertility — reveals that the locust in the title is Tod.

Novelists of his era praised Nathanael West's writing, but notoriety and critical acclaim for his works lagged behind those for his peers in terms of readers and book sales. The Day of the Locust only sold about 1480 copies following its first publishing. Noted critic Harold Bloom included it in his list of canonical works in the book The Western Canon. The novel was adapted into the critically acclaimed film The Day of the Locust (1975), directed by John Schlesinger.

The Day of the Locust was released by Paramount Pictures in 1975. The film was directed by John Schlesinger and starred William Atherton as Tod Hackett, Donald Sutherland as Homer Simpson, Burgess Meredith as Harry Greener, and Karen Black as Faye Greener.

Bob Dylan recorded a song called "Day of the Locusts" for his 1970 album New Morning. The song has no relation to the story in West's novel. The 1970s Pop Chronicles audio documentary includes an excerpt dramatically read by Thom Beck in Show 44, "Revolt of the Fat Angel: Some samples of the Los Angeles sound." The 1982 song "Call of the West" by the Los Angeles new wave band Wall of Voodoo—which "follows some Middle American sad sack as he chases a vague and hopeless dream in California"—has been described as being "as close as pop music has gotten to capturing the bitter chaos of the final chapter of Nathanael West's The Day of the Locust". The novel is mentioned in the comic book series Y: The Last Man (2002–2008), whose main character describes it as "the greatest novel of all time". The novel is referenced in the third season of the television series Six Feet Under (2003) when a character is being shown a rental house in part of a small community, and comments that it is “very Day of the Locust”. The 2009 song "Peeled Apples" from the Journal for Plague Lovers album by the Welsh band Manic Street Preachers includes the line referencing one of the novel's characters: "a dwarf takes his cockerel out on a cockfight." British theatre company Punchdrunk's 2013 performance piece The Drowned Man borrows heavily from The Day of the Locust, incorporating several of the novel's characters and themes into the overarching narrative. In February 2015, BBC Radio 3 broadcast a 45 minute program dedicated to The Day of the Locust, heralding it as a major twentieth century classic. The show's host, historian Adam Smith, related the roots of the novel to the political situation of the time. He contrasted the message of the novel to the lives of Ronald Reagan, who would go on to become Governor of California, and Richard Nixon, who was "already shaping his skills at 'doing the people's hating for them'". The Aimee Mann song "Patient Zero," from her 2017 album Mental Illness, tells a story of broken dreams in Hollywood, and references the novel with the line "the locusts had their day." Mentioned in a dialogue with Lawrence Krauss titled: "Johnny Depp & Lawrence Krauss: Finding The Creativity In Madness". Johnny Depp remembers how Hunter Thompson was very impressed with Depp's familiarity with Day of the Locust as well as Nathanael West more broadly. He felt their shared appreciation for this work brought them closer.