A Cool Million and The Dream Life of Balso Snell
Subtitle: Two Novels
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Published: June 27, 2006
Language: eng
Number of pages: 180
ISBN-13: 9780374530273
First sentence: While walking in the tall grass that has sprung up around the city of Troy, Balso Snell came upon the famous wooden horse of the Greeks.
Description: " Nathanael West was only thirty-seven when he died in 1940, but his depictions of the sometimes comic, sometimes horrifying aspects of the American scene rival those of William Faulkner and Flannery O'Connor. A Cool Million, written in 1934, is a satiric Horatio Alger story set in the midst of the Depression. The Dream Life of Balso Snell (1931) was described by one critic as "a fantasy about some rather scatological adventures of the hero in the innards of the Trojan horse."--Publisher's website.