article from the Forward mag, which says West lead to O'Connor, Pynchon, others

[Mark Kohut]

24 — Miss Lonelyhearts and The Day of the Locust
By Nathanael West
LIVERIGHT, 1933. 213 PAGES.
RANDOMHOUSE, 1939. 238 PAGES.

“Men have always fought their misery with dreams. Although dreams were once powerful, they have been made puerile by the movies, radio and newspapers. Among many betrayals, this one is the worst.” So muses Miss Lonelyhearts, and the sentiment could stand as the motto for both of these exquisite short novels. More powerfully perhaps than any other artist, Nathanael West argued through his fiction that imagination and fantasy had been commoditized and debased by the mass media (what Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer would later call the “culture industry”) and that people have consequently been stripped of their sympathies for one another. And just think: West never even saw television. Imagine how he would have felt about that.