Miss Lonelyhearts and a cool million - Nathanael West

'West's novels are a deliberate assault on the common man's notion of reality; for violence is not only his subject matter, but also his technique ... In no writer is there so absolute a sense of the misery of being human, though he also believes that such misery is a more proper occasion for laughter than tears.'

In Miss Lonelyhearts, he creates the portrait of a character, all nerves and no skin, the fool of pity, whom the quite ordinary horror of ordinary life lacerates to the point of madness. His protagonist is given the job of answering 'letters to the lovelorn' on a daily newspaper; and he finds in this job, a joke to others (he must pretend in his column to be a woman, for only women presumably suffer and sympathize), a revelation of human misery too acute for him to bear... 'Miss Lonelyhearts is, finally, the comic butt who takes upon himself the sins of the world' — Leslie A. Fiedler in Love and Death in the American Novel

A Cool Million parodies the myth of the American dream of success and wealth. Expectations have been shattered, suffering, boredom, and violence are a part of everyday life. West shows the effects of this on both the individual and society as a whole. Taken together, these two modern fables present a powerful indictment of America in the 1930s.