 1931 first edition cover | |
| Author | Nathanael West |
|---|---|
| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
| Genre | Novel |
| Publisher | Contact Editions |
Publication date | 1931 |
| Media type | Print (Paperback) |
| Pages | 95 pp |
The Dream Life of Balso Snell is a 1931 novel by American author Nathanael West. West's first novel, it presents a young man's immature and cynical search for meaning in a series of dreamlike encounters inside the entrails of the Trojan Horse.
Balso, the protagonist, comes across the Trojan Horse in the tall grass around Troy and promptly seeks a way to get in: “the mouth was beyond his reach, the navel provided a cul-de-sac, and so, forgetting his dignity, he approached the last. O Anus Mirabilis!” The literary critic Leslie Fiedler reads much into this and sees the whole novel as “a fractured and dissolving parable of the very process by which the emancipated Jew enters into the world of Western Culture.” [1] Inside the Trojan Horse Balso encounters an array of odd characters who, he realizes, are all “writers in search of an audience”. These characters also represent various religious and artistic ideals. Balso hears their stories systematically, only to discard them one by one, in a strictly nihilist fashion.
The novel's lack of a coherent plot structure, along with its juvenile humor and abundant scatological details, are all intended to aggravate, perplex and annoy readers. The desired result, according to West, is a book that is “a protest against writing books”. [2] The juvenility and incoherence of the novel have prompted critics to disregard it as “a sneer in the bathroom mirror at Art” (Alan Ross [3] ), “squalid and dreadful” (Harold Bloom [4] ) and “a hysterical, obscure, disgusted shriek against the intellect” (James F. Light [5] ). Nonetheless, by its complete and disgusted rejection of all religious, political and artistic ideals The Dream Life of Balso Snell foreshadows the nihilism of West’s subsequent novels.
West began developing material for The Dream Life of Balso Snell as early as 1924; he worked on the novel during his stay in Paris in 1926 and finished a complete draft in New York City between 1927 and 1929, under the title The Journal of Balso Snell. The manuscript was rejected twice before finally getting accepted, largely due to a favorable appraisal by William Carlos Williams. The book was published in New York City by the Paris-based Contact Editions in August 1931 in an edition of 500 copies. There were no other printings during West’s lifetime. After West became famous (years after his death) for Miss Lonelyhearts and The Day of the Locust , Balso Snell was reprinted in a single volume edition of his complete novels, [6] as well as in the Library of America edition of West's collected works. [7]
Shirley Hardie Jackson was an American writer known primarily for her works of horror and mystery. Her writing career spanned over two decades, during which she composed six novels, two memoirs, and more than 200 short stories.
Edmund Wilson Jr. was an American writer, literary critic and journalist. He is widely regarded as one of the most important literary critics of the 20th century. Wilson began his career as a journalist, writing for publications such as Vanity Fair and The New Yorker. He helped to edit The New Republic, served as chief book critic for The New Yorker, and was a frequent contributor to The New York Review of Books. Wilson was the author of more than twenty books, including Axel's Castle, Patriotic Gore, and a work of fiction, Memoirs of Hecate County. He was a friend of many notable figures of the time, including F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, and John Dos Passos. His scheme for a Library of America series of national classic works came to fruition through the efforts of Jason Epstein after Wilson's death. He was a two-time winner of the National Book Award and received the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1964.
Nathanael West was an American writer and screenwriter. He is remembered for two darkly satirical novels: Miss Lonelyhearts (1933) and The Day of the Locust (1939), set respectively in the newspaper and Hollywood film industries.
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Our great novelists, though experts on indignity and assault, on loneliness and terror, tend to avoid treating the passionate encounter of a man and a woman, which we expect at the center of a novel. Indeed, they rather shy away from permitting in their fictions the presence of any full-fledged, mature women, giving us instead monsters of virtue or bitchery, symbols of the rejection or fear of sexuality.
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This is a bibliography of works by Nathanael West
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