Sunday Feature: The Day of the Locust

Adam Smith explores Nathanael West's great 1938 Hollywood novel The Day of the Locust and its roots in the political turmoil of its time. He focuses on the career paths of two men living in Los Angeles as West wrote the book - Ronald Reagan and Richard Nixon - who he believes channelled the resentments West divined into a political movement which swept America. Adam visits West's old haunts and mingles with the crowd at a contemporary movie premiere in a bid to understand the very Californian frustrations West saw all around him. And he explores how, finally, in the 1980s, Reagan, once a thwarted actor, was able to fuse middle-class resentments with a sunny Hollywood optimism, in a political alchemy that transformed America. With contributions from Lisa McGirr, Steve Ross, Rick Perlstein, Stephen Schwartz, Jay Martin, Joe Woodward, Becky Nicolaides and Mark Feeney