The Day of the Locust characters

Appears from the start

A young artist newly employed in a Hollywood studio's design department. He observes the people living at the edge of the film industry with a mixture of professional curiosity and unease, while privately developing a large painting of Los Angeles in collapse.

First appears in chapter 2

A successful screenwriter who welcomes Tod into the social life of Hollywood. His carefully staged house and cultivated manner make him one of the established film people against whom Tod measures the industry's strangeness.

First appears in chapter 4

An aspiring actress living in Tod's apartment building with her father. Young, energetic, and intent on becoming a star, she treats performance as both a vocation and a way of managing the men attracted to her.

First appears in chapter 4

Faye's aging father, a former vaudeville performer reduced to selling homemade polish from door to door. Even in illness and poverty, he falls instinctively into rehearsed gestures, comic routines, and theatrical complaints.

First appears in chapter 6

A retired hotel bookkeeper from Iowa who has come to California for his health. Large, shy, and painfully unused to intimacy, he lives alone in a modest house and responds to Faye and Harry with earnest generosity.

First appears in chapter 7

A small, combative bookmaker and acquaintance of Tod's. His quick temper and constant quarrels give physical form to the aggression running beneath the city's artificial pleasures.

First appears in chapter 9

A handsome young man who dresses and behaves like a screen cowboy while living on the margins of Hollywood. He camps in the hills and pursues Faye with a mixture of indolence and possessiveness.

First appears in chapter 10

Earle's Mexican friend, a skilled handler of fighting birds who sells gamecocks and joins the circle around Faye. His self-possession and physical ease contrast with Homer's anxious awkwardness.

First appears in chapter 12

A woman who operates a discreet establishment where staged films cater to wealthy clients. She presents her business with the same practical professionalism that the studios bring to mass entertainment.

First appears in chapter 25

A young screen performer whose childish costume and practiced antics draw attention in a crowd outside a Hollywood premiere. He treats strangers as an audience and persists when his performance is not welcomed.