Nathanael West (born Nathan Weinstein; October 17, 1903 – December 22, 1940) was an American writer and screenwriter. He is remembered for two darkly

satirical Satire is a genre of the visual arts, visual, literature, literary, and performing arts, usually in the form of fiction and less frequently Nonfiction, non-fiction, in which vices, follies, abuses, and shortcomings are held up to ridicule, ...

novels: '' Miss Lonelyhearts'' (1933) and '' The Day of the Locust'' (1939), set respectively in the newspaper and Hollywood film industries.

Early life

Nathanael West was born Nathan Weinstein in New York City, the first child of Ashkenazi Jewish parents Max (Morduch) Weinstein (1878–1932) and Anuta (Anna, née Wallenstein, 1878–1935), from Kovno, Russia (present-day Kaunas, Lithuania), who maintained an upper middle class household in a Jewish neighborhood on the

Upper West Side The Upper West Side (UWS) is a neighborhood in the borough of Manhattan in New York City. It is bounded by Central Park on the east, the Hudson River on the west, West 59th Street to the south, and West 110th Street to the north. The Upper We ...

. West displayed little ambition in academics, dropping out of high school and only gaining admission into Tufts College by forging his high school transcript. After being expelled from Tufts, West got into Brown University by appropriating the transcript of a fellow Tufts student, his cousin, Nathan Weinstein. Although West did little schoolwork at Brown, he read extensively. He ignored the realist fiction of his American contemporaries in favor of French surrealists and British and Irish poets of the 1890s, in particular

Oscar Wilde Oscar Fingal O'Fflahertie Wills Wilde (16 October 185430 November 1900) was an Irish author, poet, and playwright. After writing in different literary styles throughout the 1880s, he became one of the most popular and influential playwright ...

. West's interests emphasized unusual literary style as well as unusual content. He became interested in Christianity and

mysticism Mysticism is popularly known as becoming one with God or the Absolute (philosophy), Absolute, but may refer to any kind of Religious ecstasy, ecstasy or altered state of consciousness which is given a religious or Spirituality, spiritual meani ...

as experienced or expressed through literature and art. West's friends at Camp Paradox, a summer camp in Adirondack, New York, nicknamed him Pep in ironic reference to his somnolent disposition. West acknowledged and made fun of his lack of physical prowess in recounting the story of a baseball game where he cost his team the game. Wells Root, a close friend of West, remembers hearing this tale half a dozen times, recalling that everyone had placed bets on the game, which came down to the final inning with the score tied and the enemy at bat with two outs. At that point the batter hit a long fly towards West;

He put his hands up to catch it and for some inexplicable reason didn't hold them close together. The ball tore through, hit him in the forehead, and bounced into some brush. There was a roar from the crowd and esttook one look and turned tail. To a man, the crowd had risen, gathered bats, sticks, stones, and anything they could lay hands on and were in hot pursuit. He vanished into some woods and didn't emerge until nightfall. In telling the story he was convinced that if they had caught him they would have killed him.

It is unclear whether this ever happened, but West later re-imagined this in his short story " Western Union Boy". As Jewish students were not allowed to join most fraternities, his main friend was his future brother-in-law S.J. Perelman. (Perelman married West's sister Laura.) West barely finished at Brown with a degree. He then went to Paris for three months, and it was at this time that he changed his name to Nathanael West. His family, who had supported him thus far, ran into financial difficulties during the late 1920s. West returned home and worked sporadically in construction for his father, eventually finding a job as the night manager of the Hotel Kenmore Hall on East 23rd Street in Manhattan. One of West's experiences at the hotel inspired the incident between Romola Martin and Homer Simpson that appeared in his novel '' The Day of the Locust'' (1939). In 1933 he was employed as the manager of the Sutton Hotel in New York City, located at 330 E. 56th Street.

Author

Although West had been working on his writing since college, it was not until his quiet night job at the hotel that he found the time to put his novel together. It was then that he wrote what became '' Miss Lonelyhearts'' (1933).

Maxim Lieber Maxim Lieber (October 15, 1897 – April 10, 1993) was a prominent American literary agent in New York City during the 1930s and 1940s. The Soviet spy Whittaker Chambers named him as an accomplice in 1949, and Lieber fled first to Mexico and then ...

served as his literary agent in 1933. In 1931, however, two years before he completed ''Miss Lonelyhearts'', West published '' The Dream Life of Balso Snell'', a novel that he started in college. By then, West was within a group of writers working in and around New York City that included

William Carlos Williams William Carlos Williams (September 17, 1883 – March 4, 1963) was an American poet and physician closely associated with modernism and imagism. His '' Spring and All'' (1923) was written in the wake of T. S. Eliot's '' The Waste Land'' (1922). ...

and

Dashiell Hammett Samuel Dashiell Hammett ( ; May 27, 1894 – January 10, 1961) was an American writer of hard-boiled detective novels and short stories. He was also a screenwriter and political activist. Among the characters he created are Sam Spade ('' The Ma ...

. In 1933, West bought a farm in eastern Pennsylvania, but he soon got a job as a contract scriptwriter for

Columbia Pictures Columbia Pictures Industries, Inc., Trade name, doing business as Columbia Pictures, is an American film Production company, production and Film distributor, distribution company that is the flagship unit of the Sony Pictures Motion Picture Group ...

and moved to Hollywood. He published a '' A Cool Million'' in 1934. None of West's three works sold well, earning him less than $800, so he spent the mid-1930s in financial difficulty, sporadically collaborating on screenplays. Many of the films he worked on were

B movie A B movie, or B film, is a type of cheap, low-budget commercial motion picture. Originally, during the Classical Hollywood cinema, Golden Age of Hollywood, this term specifically referred to films meant to be shown as the lesser-known second ...

s, such as '' Five Came Back'' (1939). It was at this time that he wrote '' The Day of the Locust.'' He took many of the settings and minor characters of his novel directly from his experience living in a hotel on Hollywood Boulevard. In November 1939, West was hired as a screenwriter by

RKO Radio Pictures RKO Radio Pictures Inc., commonly known as RKO Pictures or simply RKO, is an American film production and distribution company, historically one of the "Big Five" film studios of Hollywood's Golden Age. The business was formed after the Kei ...

, where he collaborated with Boris Ingster on a film adaptation of the novel '' Before the Fact'' (1932) by Francis Iles. West and Ingster wrote the screenplay in seven weeks, with West focusing on characterization and dialogue and Ingster focusing on the narrative structure. RKO assigned the film, eventually released as '' Suspicion'' (1941), to

Alfred Hitchcock Sir Alfred Joseph Hitchcock (13 August 1899 – 29 April 1980) was an English film director. He is widely regarded as one of the most influential figures in the history of cinema. In a career spanning six decades, he directed over 50 featu ...

; but Hitchcock already had his own, substantially different, screenplay. Hitchcock's screenplay was written by Samson Raphaelson, Joan Harrison (Hitchcock's secretary), and

Alma Reville Alma Lucy Reville, Lady Hitchcock (14 August 1899 – 6 July 1982) was an English screenwriter and film editor. She was the wife of film director Alfred Hitchcock. She collaborated on scripts for her husband's films, including ''Shadow of a Doub ...

(Hitchcock's wife). West and Ingster's screenplay was abandoned, but the text can be found in the

Library of America The Library of America (LOA) is a nonprofit publisher of classic American literature. Founded in 1979 with seed money from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Ford Foundation, the LOA has published more than 300 volumes by authors ...

's edition of West's collected works.

Death

On December 22, 1940, West and his wife Eileen McKenney were returning to Los Angeles from a hunting trip in Mexico. West ran a stop sign in El Centro, California, resulting in a collision in which he and McKenney were killed. (Their deaths occurred the day after that of their friend F. Scott Fitzgerald.) McKenney had been the inspiration for the title character in the Broadway play '' My Sister Eileen'', and she and West had been scheduled to fly to New York City for the Broadway opening on December 26. West was buried in Mount Zion Cemetery in Queens, New York, with his wife's ashes placed in his coffin.

His work

Although West was not widely known during his life, his reputation grew after his death, especially with the publication of his collected novels by New Directions in 1957. ''Miss Lonelyhearts'' is widely regarded as West's masterpiece. '' Day of the Locust'' was made into a film which came out in 1975. Likewise ''Miss Lonelyhearts'' (1933) saw production in film (1933, 1958, 1983), stage (1957), and operatic (2006) versions; and the character "Miss Lonelyhearts" in Hitchcock's film ''

Rear Window ''Rear Window'' is a 1954 American mystery film, mystery thriller film directed by Alfred Hitchcock and written by John Michael Hayes, based on Cornell Woolrich's 1942 short story "After-Dinner Story, It Had to Be Murder". Originally released ...

'' has parallels to West's work. The obscene, garish landscapes of ''The Day of the Locust'' gained force in light of the fact that the remainder of the country was living in drab poverty at the time. Though West attended

socialist Socialism is an economic ideology, economic and political philosophy encompassing diverse Economic system, economic and social systems characterised by social ownership of the means of production, as opposed to private ownership. It describes ...

rallies in New York City's Union Square, his novels have no affinity to the novels of his contemporary activist writers such as

John Steinbeck John Ernst Steinbeck ( ; February 27, 1902 – December 20, 1968) was an American writer. He won the 1962 Nobel Prize in Literature "for his realistic and imaginative writings, combining as they do sympathetic humor and keen social percep ...

and

John Dos Passos John Roderigo Dos Passos (; January 14, 1896 – September 28, 1970) was an American novelist, most notable for his U.S.A. (trilogy), ''U.S.A.'' trilogy. Born in Chicago, Dos Passos graduated from Harvard College in 1916. He traveled widely as a ...

. West's writing style does not allow the portrayal of positive political causes, as he admitted in a letter to

Malcolm Cowley Malcolm Cowley (August 24, 1898 – March 27, 1989) was an American writer, editor, historian, poet, and literary critic. His best known works include his first book of poetry, ''Blue Juniata'' (1929), and his memoir, ''Exile's Return'' ( ...

regarding ''The Day of the Locust'': "I tried to describe a meeting of the anti-Nazi league, but it didn't fit and I had to substitute a whorehouse and a dirty film". West saw the

American dream The "American Dream" is a phrase referring to a purported national ethos of the United States: that every person has the freedom and opportunity to succeed and attain a better life. The phrase was popularized by James Truslow Adams during the ...

as having been betrayed, both spiritually and materially, and in his writing he presented "a sweeping rejection of political causes, religious faith, artistic redemption and romantic love". This idea of the corrupt American dream endured long after his death, in the form of the term "West's disease", coined by the poet W.H. Auden to refer to poverty that exists in both a spiritual and economic sense. Jay Martin wrote an extensive biography of West in 1970. Another biography, ''Lonelyhearts: The Screwball World of Nathanael West and Eileen McKenney'', by Marion Meade was published in 2010.

Published works

Novels

* '' The Dream Life of Balso Snell'' (1931) * '' Miss Lonelyhearts'' (1933) * '' A Cool Million'' (1934) * '' The Day of the Locust'' (1939)

Plays

* '' Even Stephen'' (1934, with S.J. Perelman) * '' Good Hunting'' (1938, with Joseph Schrank)

Short stories

* " Western Union Boy" * " The Imposter"

Posthumous collections

* Bercovitch, Sacvan, ed. ''Nathanael West, Novels and Other Writings'' (Library of America, 1997)

Screenplays

* '' Ticket to Paradise'' (1936) * ''Follow Your Heart'' (1936) * ''The President's Mystery'' (1936) * ''Rhythm in the Clouds'' (1937) * ''It Could Happen to You'' (1937) * ''Born to Be Wild'' (1938) * '' Five Came Back'' (1939) * ''

I Stole a Million ''I Stole a Million'' is a 1939 film noir crime film starring George Raft as a cab driver turned small-time crook who makes a big score and lives to regret it. The supporting cast includes Claire Trevor, Dick Foran, and Victor Jory. The movie ...

'' (1939) * '' Stranger on the Third Floor'' (1940) * '' The Spirit of Culver'' (1940) * '' Men Against the Sky'' (1940) * '' Let's Make Music'' (1940) * '' Before the Fact'' (1940, not produced)

References

External links

* * * * Ingrid Norton
"The Nihilism of Nathanael West"
''Open Letters Monthly'' (January 2011) * Elizabeth Hardwick
"Funny as a Crutch"
''New York Review of Books'', November 6, 2003

thomaslarson.com *
Profile
Library of America website
Promotional website for ''Lonelyhearts: The Screwball World of Nathanael West and Eileen McKenney''
nathanaelwest.com *
"The Day of the Locust,"
BBC Radio 3 Sunday Feature (February 2015) {{DEFAULTSORT:West, Nathanael 1940 deaths 1903 births 20th-century American male writers 20th-century American novelists 20th-century American screenwriters American male novelists American people of Lithuanian-Jewish descent American satirical novelists Brown University alumni Burials at Mount Zion Cemetery (New York City) Jewish American novelists Jewish American screenwriters Modernist writers People from Hollywood, Los Angeles People from the Upper West Side Writers from Manhattan Road incident deaths in California Screenwriters from California Novelists from Los Angeles 20th-century American Jews