8vo (203 mm x 123 mm). 1 [blank], 3 ff., 238 pp., 1 [blank]. Original red cloth with orange printed spine label, top edge black, unclipped dustjacket with price of $2.00 on the front flap. Light wear and rubbing to dustjacket, but spared the professional restoration that most copies seem to have undergone, owner’s pen signature to front free endpaper offset to inner flap of dustjacket, light owner’s stamp to dedication page, otherwise a remarkably fresh copy.

West was a relatively-unknown author when he died in a car crash alongside his wife in December 1940, just a year after The Day of the Locust was published. His friend F. Scott Fitzgerald, who died the day before the Wests, had written: "[The Day of the Locust] has scenes of extraordinary power...Especially I was impressed by the pathological crowd at the premiere, the character and handling of the aspirant actress, and the uncanny almost medieval feeling of some of his Hollywood background set off by those vividly drawn grotesques" (A. Turnbull, ed. The Letters of F. Scott Fitzgerald, p. 608). Despite this early appreciation, it took years for the book to become recognized as a modern American classic and for critics to deem it the best novel ever written about Hollywood.