Viva Modern Critical Interpretations Nathanael West’s Miss Lonelyhearts

While a very short novel might be easy to overlook, Nathanael West’s Miss Lonelyhearts (1933) has been compared to The Sun Also Rises and The Great Gatsby. One of the few titles written by West, who died in a car crash at age 37, Miss Lonelyhearts was published when he was 30 and is seen as his masterpiece. In its pages, a newspaper’s money-making venture — the addition of an advice column — pulls us into a world of nihilistic despair, as we follow the life of the man appointed to reply to the seemingly hopeless letters of a lot and illeducated public still grappling for answers. Surely, West’s short novel is, quite consciously, one of a series of warnings to the modern age, not warning out of fear that we will not be saints, but out of fear that we will not do what human can do. — Richard P. Lynch Like the many narratives Miss Lonelyhearts tries to escape, the Christ legend is doomed to the same fraudulence; as long as Miss Lonelyhearts is who he is, even the Christ dream is compromised fatally, like a compulsively recurring dream that ends only with the end of the dreamer. — Mark Conroy VIVA MODERN CRITICAL INTERPRETATIONS presents the best current criticism on the most widely read and studied poems, novels and dramas of the Western world, from Oedipus Rex and the Iliad to such modern and contemporary works as William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury and Don DeLillo’s White Noise. Each volume opens with an introductory essay and editor’s note by Harold Bloom and includes a bibliography, a chronology of the author’s life and works, and notes on the contributors. Taken together, VIVA MODERN CRITICAL INTERPRETATIONS provides a comprehensive critical guide to the most vital and influential works of the Western literary tradition.