The illustrious Mr. West is one controversial figure. Some people admire him for being a proud artist who stands up for what he believes; others see him as a self-righteous show-off who wouldn't know good taste if it smacked him in the face.

Oh, wait—you thought we were talking about Kanye? Don't be silly. In fact, we're actually talking about the original King West of Controversy—our boy Nathanael.

Born Nathan Weinstein, Nathanael West is an oft-forgotten luminary of 1930s American literature. West rolled with heavyweights like William Carlos Williams and wrote bizarre novels that avoided traditional plots like the plague—in other words, this guy believed in Art with a capital A. Sadly, his life was cut short when he and his wife Eileen McKenney were killed in a car accident in 1940, just a year after the publication of The Day of the Locust.

Inspired by West's real-life experience selling scripts in the movie biz, The Day of the Locust is a dark, dank exploration of 1930s Hollywood. Don't expect glitz and glamor with this one, though: we spend so much time in the city's seedy underbelly that we could plant a national forest. The novel follows Tod Hackett, a painter and costume-designer with an obsessive crush on a seventeen-year-old D-Lister. How charming.

It would be swell if we could squeeze the entirety of The Day of the Locust into a tiny nutshell, but we're not sure if that's possible—nothing smaller than a brontosaurus egg could do. Instead, think of The Day of the Locust as an open-world video game: the pleasure comes from witnessing an insane series of events, rather than from following a simple story with a beginning, middle, and end.

Plus, this thing features more sex and mayhem than every Grand Theft Auto combined. Whether that's a good or bad thing, of course, depends entirely on you.

One of the most important parts of growing up is learning how to deal with disappointment.

It doesn't matter if you've planned out your entire life from high school to retirement. It doesn't matter if you score your dream job straight out of college. It doesn't even matter if you meet the boy or girl of your dreams. Things might go smoothly for a while, but there's no way to entirely avoid potholes on the road called life.

The Day of the Locust is pretty much a crash-course in how not to deal with disappointment. You shouldn't deal with it like Homer, who bottles up emotions like he's working at a soda factory. You shouldn't do it like Earle, who gets angrier than an NFL linebacker at a salad bar. And you definitely shouldn't do it like Tod, who just turns into a straight-up maniac.

In other words, this isn't exactly the most charismatic cast of characters around (frankly, we'd rather spend a Sunday afternoon with Tony Soprano then Harry Greener). But that's the point. By creating a pretty unlikeable cast of characters, Nathanael West is warning us of some of the most common pitfalls of adulthood.