ABSTRACT
Since his death in a car crash in 1940, the transformation in Nathanael West's reputation has been arresting. Ignored in life, West has become, sixty years after his death, an indispensable interpreter of the modern world. West's striking blend of savagery and fun, of insanity and laughter, scandalized many in the years of the Depression, of grave commitment to all the noble causes of the anti-Fascist front. West is showing that there is no place for the Christ vision in the modern world, that Miss Lonelyhearts is a sick Jesus freak, and that Christianity is pathological, intensifying the ills it fraudulently claims to cure. West himself does not know, any more than his protagonist, how to answer the letters: the challenge is to do better than just sympathize. West was certainly no lover of traditional religion, but this new, specifically American religion provoked in him nothing but contempt.
