The Day of the Locust
By Nathanael West
 
First UK edition, first impression: London: The Grey Walls Press, 1951.

Octavo. Original dark blue cloth, spine lettered in gilt. With the original dust jacket, unclipped, priced 9s. 6d. net.

A very good copy: a little light marking to the lower board, with a bit of rubbing to the bottom edges; some spotting and off-setting to the endpapers and paste-downs; some dustiness to the top edge, the contents otherwise clean throughout.

The dust jacket also very good: some toning to the spine panel; hint of faint spotting to upper panel; a small nick to the spine foot; a small nick and chip to the top corner of the upper flap; a little rubbing to the edges.

West's last novel was first published in New York by Random House in 1939; the present Grey Walls Press edition, issued in 1951, is its first appearance in England. The book is dedicated "For Laura" - Laura Perelman, née West, the author's sister and the wife of the humorist S. J. Perelman. West died in a car accident in California on 22 December 1940, one day after the death of his close friend F. Scott Fitzgerald; the present jacket's own descriptive notice draws the comparison directly, weighing the novel against Fitzgerald's posthumously published The Last Tycoon.

Adapted for the screen in 1975 by John Schlesinger from a screenplay by Waldo Salt, with Burgess Meredith earning an Academy Award nomination for his performance, the novel was named among Time magazine's All-Time 100 Novels in 2005. Its minor character Homer Simpson also supplied Matt Groening, by his own account, with the surname for television's Simpson family.