Recommendations
Books Like Miss Lonelyhearts
Eight novels of spiritual crisis, American despair, and Depression-era darkness
West's compressed masterpiece recommends novels that examine spiritual crisis in a secular world, the relationship between individual suffering and collective despair, and the American literary tradition of dark comedy and satirical tragedy from the 1930s onward.
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The Day of the Locust
by Nathanael West
Tod Hackett arrives in Hollywood and witnesses the rage beneath its glamour — West's second masterpiece and the essential companion to Miss Lonelyhearts; where Miss Lonelyhearts examines spiritual crisis through an individual overwhelmed by others' suffering, The Day of the Locust examines collective cultural desperation through a crowd's fury; reading them together completes West's portrait of American violence and disappointment
- 2Buy
The Stranger
by Albert Camus
Meursault's flat narration of his own crime — the French existentialist novel most directly parallel to Miss Lonelyhearts in its examination of a consciousness that cannot respond to suffering with ordinary empathy; where Miss Lonelyhearts is destroyed by too much feeling, Meursault is destroyed by too little; the two novels are the opposite poles of the same existentialist question about the relationship between self and others' pain
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Nightmare Alley
by William Lindsay Gresham
Stanton Carlisle rises from carnival geek to mentalist to con man preying on the bereaved — Gresham's 1946 novel is the American noir closest in spirit to Miss Lonelyhearts: both examine men who build careers out of giving people what they need to hear (advice, spiritual comfort) and who are eventually destroyed by their own capacity for cruelty; both are savage portraits of American spiritual hunger
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Flannery O'Connor: Complete Stories
by Flannery O'Connor
A collection of O'Connor's short fiction set in the American South — O'Connor has acknowledged West as a major influence, and the violent, grotesque, Catholic-inflected spirituality of her stories is directly descended from Miss Lonelyhearts; both writers are interested in the moment when grace becomes violence, when spiritual seeking produces catastrophe; O'Connor's 'A Good Man Is Hard to Find' and 'The Violent Bear It Away' are the most direct heirs
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Tobacco Road
by Erskine Caldwell
The Lester family of Georgia — white tenant farmers in the depths of the Depression, unable to plant their own tobacco road — Caldwell's 1932 novel shares Miss Lonelyhearts' year and its unflinching examination of human beings at the bottom of American life; where West's suffering arrives in letters, Caldwell's is embedded in a landscape and a family; both novels are about what the Depression revealed about the American promise
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Catch-22
by Joseph Heller
Yossarian among the bomber crews of the Mediterranean — Heller's satirical novel shares West's fundamental technique: using comedy to make arguments about systematic madness that would be unbearable in tragedy; West invented this technique in American letters (Miss Lonelyhearts is a tragic comedy about spiritual crisis), and Heller extended it to military absurdism; West is one of Heller's acknowledged ancestors
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Notes from Underground
by Fyodor Dostoevsky
The Underground Man's confession — the Russian precursor to Miss Lonelyhearts' examination of hyperconscious alienation; West knew Dostoevsky's work, and Miss Lonelyhearts is in direct conversation with the Underground Man tradition: a narrator who can see the suffering around him with terrible clarity but is incapable of responding to it with genuine human connection
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Blood Meridian
by Cormac McCarthy
The scalp-hunting crew of Captain Glanton on the Texas-Mexico border in the 1840s — McCarthy's novel of extreme violence shares Miss Lonelyhearts' conviction that violence is the terminal condition of American life; where West uses compression and black comedy, McCarthy uses biblical scope and relentless brutality; both novels ask what it means that violence is so fundamental to the American experience
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