The Day of the Locust and Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992, are nominally both about dreams deferred. In the case of The Day of the Locust, the dreams in question are those of very individual fictional characters. In Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992, Smith makes a leap toward explaining the deferred dreams of all African-Americans, basing her claim to that deferral on the issue of the beating of Rodney King. Unfortunate as that beating may have been, when Smith wrote her account, it was not

yet generally known that King was not the choirboy he was originally painted to be. That is no excuse for police brutality, of course, but it does dampen the ardor with which a reader can accept the hundreds of interviews Smith conducted as reflective of reality. They may be reflective of someone's instantaneous truth, but certainly they are not reflective of deep human longings, passions and disappointments, as is the work of Nathanael West.

Particularly ludicrous is the story of Chung Lee, a Korean store owner. Smith begins it with the information, in Korean and English, that Lee's store has been looted. Perhaps the only true expression in this story is that Chung Lee, realizing a riot had begun and his merchandise destroyed, gave up all sense of attachment to it. This is particularly Eastern; it sheds more light on the culture Lee came from than on the one he is in. And certainly, it does nothing to reveal the 'everyman' quality of dreams deferred/destroyed. It is dispassionate both in the telling by Smith and in the reaction by Lee. That, in itself, is un-American, a fact that cannot be doubted if anyone has watched TV news interviewing people in response to actual riots or other civil upheavals. Whether it is the camera in front of them that causes the abundance of tears and anguish, one cannot know; one cannot know what happens when the cameras stop rolling.

On the other hand, Anna Deavere Smith, who proclaims as certain independence of vision by virtue of being an artist, cannot see the Rodney King beating and the Los Angeles riots through anything like a dispassionate eye; despite that, her accounts are ungraceful, mired in an unreality that bears the stamp of knee-jerk liberalism far more than the stamp of what one might call passionate artistic journalism that she pretends they enjoy.

Tod Hackett, the main character in The Day of the Locust, envisions his role in life as one of the great portrait painter of a less-than-brave new world. While his 'day job' is designing sets for whatever the studio desires, something his friends from Yale see as a loss of status, Tod himself wants to paint the anger, the bitterness, the disappointment and the hopelessness of Midwesterners who expected to become stars and/or millionaires overnight in the golden West. He may not personally have come to grips with the concept of dreams deferred-or perhaps more accurately, destroyed-but he is certainly intellectually engaged with the concept. Indeed, he is more intellectually engaged with it than personally. When his unrequited lust for Faye causes him to almost be

Some common words found in the essay are:
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Approximate Word count = 1748
Approximate Pages = 7 (250 words per page double spaced)