ABSTRACT
The immense irreverence of A Cool Million is disconcerting to most readers; West takes something sacred to most Americans, our sense of possibility, and rides it mercilessly, pointing out how illusory it is and demonstrating its tragic impact on the American consciousness and on American society. Written at the height of the Great Depression, in 1934, A Cool Million is a pessimistic and cynical view of American culture and society. Even during the Depression, many Americans still felt that they were personally responsible for being out of work and for all the dislocations convulsing America. A Cool Million, by Nathanael West, is an exasperating novel. It deals with an issue that is central to the American consciousness—the self-made man—but it does so in such a zany manner that it is hard to take the novel seriously. It is a brilliant parody of the Horatio Alger myth, which was just dying out in the 1930s.
