Word: missing
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Dates: during 1970-1970
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...Cover: Color photograph of Miss Eugenie Langle, 78, by Pete Turner...
West saw the economic collapse in -1929 as the outward sign of a long overdue spiritual decay, conceiving his characters not as microcosms of material injustices, but human beings cut adrift in an empty world. The bleakness of Miss Lonely-hearts and The Day of the Locust reflect West's own isolation. He was always very shy, had few friends and never attended school regularly. After graduating from college he left immediately for Paris and from a dark corner in Sylvia Beach's bookshop watched Joyce and Hemingway browse through the stacks...
...thirties denuded the last of the Horatio Algers and radicalized intellectuals, but the middle class reached for alternative ways out. Holywood became their one-dimen-sional Mecca, dance marathons and polesitting were popularized, and newspapers began running columns of advice for lost souls. West's last three novels, Miss Lonelyhearts, A Cool Million and The Day of the Locust, use these vaudvillian antics not satirically, but with an eye to the deep pain that necessitated them...
Regardless, Martin's biography has done much to stimulate a revival of interest in West. It would be difficult to place him as a major artist of the first half of the twentieth century, but his contribution to literature is significant. Miss Lonelyhearts and The Day of the Locust, probably his best novels, are both short, compressed and episodic, anticipating forms only now being elaborated by Brautigan and Barthelme. West's use of artifacts from mass culture and delicate caricatures during a time concerned with the purity of literature evidences his versatile and original talent. However, he made very little...
...this first-person account of gropeshrink, Jane Howard presents herself frankly as a rather too prim Midwestern miss who became a busy New York bachelor-girl reporter and found herself starved for what the movement promised to provide: emotional closeness. Assigned by LIFE to do a piece on Esalen Institute, a sort of Harvard of the emotions, she got so involved in the movement that she decided to do the whole sensitivity circuit. The result is Please Touch...