New Day (novel) New Day (novel) New Day is a 1949 book by Jamaican author V. S. Reid. It was Reid's first novel. "New Day" deals with the political history of Jamaica as told by a character named Campbell, who is a boy at the time of the Morant Bay Rebellion (in 1865) and an old man during its final chapters. It may have been the first novel to use Jamaican vernacular as its language of narration. Reid employed the Jamaican dialect as a springboard for creating a distinctive literary variant and for achieving a greater depth in the English language. Reid was
The Day of the Locust dangerous results. Novelists of his era praised Nathanael West's writing, but notoriety and critical acclaim for his works lagged behind his peers in terms of readers and book sales. "The Day of the Locust" only sold about 1480 copies following its first publishing. Critics began to situate "The Day of the Locust" within the canon in the 1950s, more than a decade after a fatal car crash claimed the author's life. In 1998, the Modern Library ranked "The Day of the Locust" seventy-third on its list of the 100 best English-language novels of the 20th century. "Time" magazine included the