Writer, born in New York City, New York, USA. He studied at Tufts (1921) and Brown (1924 PhB), and lived in Paris for two years, where he finished his first novel. He changed his name legally in 1926. Until 1933 he was a manager of various inexpensive hotels belonging to his father in New York City while continuing to write, and then settled in California (1935) to become a screenwriter (193640). His fiction was largely neglected until after he and his wife died in an automobile accident. His work was revived by critics during 194757, and he is praised for its sensitive mix of mordant humour and pathos, as in the novels Miss Lonelyhearts (1933) and The Day of the Locust (1939).
Early life
Nathanael West was born in New York City, the first child of German-speaking Russian Jewish parents from Lithuania who maintained an upper-middle class household in a Jewish neighborhood on the Upper West Side. After being expelled from Tufts, West got into Brown University by appropriating the transcript of a fellow Tufts student who was also named Nathan Weinstein. West's classmates at Brown nicknamed him "Pep": it is not known whether this indicated a great deal of physical energy on West's part or (in the sarcastic tradition of many nicknames) the exact opposite. West returned home and worked sporadically in construction for his father, eventually finding a job as the night manager of the Kenmore Hotel on East 23rd Street in Manhattan. One of West's real-life experiences at the hotel inspired the incident between Romola Martin and Homer Simpson that would later appear in The Day of the Locust.
Career as 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 at this time that West wrote what would eventually become Miss Lonelyhearts (1933). In 1931, however, two years before he completed Miss Lonelyhearts, West published The Dream Life of Balso Snell, a novel he had conceived of in college. By this time, West was working within a group of writers working in and around New York that included William Carlos Williams and Dashiell Hammett.
In 1933, West bought a farm in eastern Pennsylvania but soon got a job as a contract scriptwriter for Columbia Pictures and moved to Hollywood. None of West's three works were selling well, however, so he spent the mid-1930s in financial difficulty, sporadically collaborating on screenplays. It was at this time that West wrote The Day of the Locust, which would be published in 1939.
Death
West and his new wife, Eileen McKenney, died in a car accident the day after his friend F. West had always been an extremely bad driver, and many friends (including Perelman) who otherwise enjoyed his company had always refused to accept rides when West was driving. It is rumored that the car accident that killed West and his wife was caused when the author, very grief-stricken over the death of his friend, ran a stop sign.
His work
Although West was still a relative unknown at the time, his reputation grew after his death, especially with the publication of his collected novels in 1957. Miss Lonelyhearts is widely regarded as West's masterpiece, and The Day of the Locust still stands as one of the best novels written about the early years of Hollywood. If one were to draw a family tree of authors who employed "black humour" in their works of fiction, West could be seen as the offspring of Gogol and Poe, and the progenitor of Saul Bellow, Vladimir Nabokov and Martin Amis (whose use of movingly inarticulate e-mails in Yellow Dog are a 21st century echo of the letters to Miss Lonelyhearts).
Most of West's fiction is, in one way or another, a response to the Depression that hit America with the stock market crash in October 1929 and continued throughout the 1930s.
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