For years he toiled, writing treatments and B-movie scripts, living, like Tod Hackett, in run down digs. He met con men and cops, prostitutes a nd failed vaudevillians. He hung out at the police precincts and went to cockfights at Pismo Beach. He explored brothels, upscale and otherwise. He became a flaneur of the city's underbelly, holding court at Musso and Frank's restaurant or the Stanley Rose bookstore, and beginning to feed all these characters and experiences into a novel he planned at first (according to his biographer Jay Martin) to call "The Cheated".
excerpt from
- Nathanael West and the Writing of Day of the Locust
- Richard Rayner
- LA Times
- 2009
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