The Day of the Locust

Tod Hackett, a set painter with ambitions as a serious artist, drifts among the people Hollywood has drawn in and failed to use: a would-be starlet, a broken vaudevillian, a violent cowboy, and a hotel bookkeeper from Iowa who has come west to die. West published it in 1939 to almost no notice and died the following year at thirty-seven. It ends in a riot at a film premiere, and it has been the standard against which Hollywood novels are measured ever since.