Nathanael West Biography and List of Works

American writer who satirized the American dream and saw that liberty and freedom have become a bizarre nightmare. He was fascinated by what he called 'the secret inner life of the masses', where the power of unfulfilled desires always threatens to turn into malignant violence. West died in a car crash at the age of thirty-seven.

"At college, and perhaps for a year afterwards, they had believed in literature, had believed in Beauty and in personal expression as an absolute end. When they lost this belief, they lost everything. Money and fame meant nothing to them. They were not worldly men."
(from Miss Lonelyhearts, 1933)

Nathanael West was born in New York, N.Y. the son of immigrant German Jews from Lithuania. His mother was Anna (Wallenstein) Weinstein, and father, Max Weinstein, a construction contractor. As a young man West showed little ambition. He studied at Brown University, Providence, where he befriended the writer and humorist S.J. Perelman - he married West's sister. During these years he started to draw cartoons and write short surreal sketches, which he later collected as the novel THE DREAM LIFE OF BALSO SNELL (1931). West did not take his studies seriously - he borrowed his cousin's work and presented it as his own and failed a crucial course in modern drama.

In 1924 West graduated with a Ph.B. degree and changed his name legally to Nathanael West. He spent a couple of years in Paris. There he wrote his first novel, The Dream Life of Balso Snell (1931), a fantasy about western civilization set in the innards of the Trojan horse. Back in the United States, West managed small hotels, Kenmore Hall from 1927 to 1930 and the Sutton Club Hotel from 1930 to 1933. In these jobs West was able to assist other writers offering them free housing. Among his visitors were Dashiell Hammett, James T. Farrell, and Erskine Caldwell.

"We all lived there half-free, sometimes all-free. Dash wrote The Thin Man at the Sutton Hotel. Pep West's uncle or cousin owned it, I think... Dash had the Royal Suite - three very small rooms. And we had to eat there most of the time because we didn't have enough money to eat anyplace else. It was awful food, almost spoiled. I think Pep brought it extra cheap. But it was the depression and I couldn't get a job. I remember reading the manuscript of The Dream Life of Balso Snell in the hotel. And I think he was also writing Miss Lonelyhearts at that time."
(Lillian Hellman in Playwrights at Work, ed. by George Plimpton, 2000)

Hotel life offered West numerous anecdotes that he used in his work. In the early 1930s West was employed as a journalist and involved with a pair of literary magazines. These experiences furnished him with the material for his masterful second novel, MISS LONELYHEARTS (1933), an allegory of America as it struggled through the Depression. The tragic farce was published when West was just thirty. It depicts a male newspaper columnist, correspondence pen name Miss Lonelyhearts. He writes his agony column in the New York Post-Dispatch daily newspaper. Shrike, the editor, is a kind of Satan and torments Miss Lonelyhearts, who has developed a Christ complex. Miss Lonelyhearts is a therapist, priest and messiah to those alienated and in pain, as a sixteen-year-old girl who was born without a nose: "I sit and look at myself all day and cry. I have a big hole in the middle of my face that scares people even myself so I can't blame the boys for not wanting to take me out. My mother loves me, but she cries terrible when she looks at me." Miss Lonelyhearts becomes involved with one of his correspondents, but he is cold to his core and unable to live in the world of decay and emptiness. In the final section the crippled Peter Doyle, married to the ungratified Fay, arrives with a gun. "The gun inside the package exploded and Miss Lonelyhearts fell, dragging the cripple with him. They both rolled part of the way down the stairs."

Despite critical success the book sold poorly. West continued with a similar theme of good aims gone wrong in his next novel, A COOL MILLION (1934), an attack on the optimistic rags-to riches ideal. The story reflects his childhood memories, when his father gave him several popular Horatio Alger novels to read - hoping that he would enter the family business.

West moved to Hollywood in 1933, to work on a film version of Miss Lonelyhearts. He returned in 1935, and lived in a cheap hotel called the Pa-Va-Sed, on North Ivar Street, near Hollywood Boulevard. In the years before he found employment, West spent time among the outcasts of Los Angeles. He remained in Hollywood for the rest of his life, working as a scriptwriter for smaller studios like Monogram.

During this time West published THE DAY OF THE LOCUST (1939), a study of the fragility of illusion. Many critics consider it, alongside F. Scott Fitzgerald's unfinished masterpiece The Last Tycoon (1941), among the best novel written about Hollywood. The protagonist, Tod Hackett, comes to California in hope of a career as a scenic artist but soon joins the disenchanted second-rate actors, technicians, labourers and other characters living on the fringes of the movie industry. Tod finds work on a film called prophetically 'The Burning of Los Angeles', and the dark comic tale ends in an apocalyptic mob riot outside a Hollywood première, as the system runs out of control.

"In the centre of the field was a gigantic pile of sets, flats and props. While he watched, a ten-ton truck added another load to it. This was the final dumping ground. He thought of Janvier's "Sargasso Sea." Just as that imaginary body of water was a history of civilization in the form of marine junkyard, the studio lot was one in the form of a dream dump. A Sargasso of the imagination! And the dump grew continually, for there wasn't a dream aloaf somewhere which wouldn't sooner or later turn up on it, having first been made photographic by plaster, canvas, lath and paint."
(from the Day of the Locust)

By a bizarre coincidence, Fitzgerald and West died on the same weekend in December 1940. West was killed in an automobile accident on December 22, near El Centro, California, with his wife Eileen McKenney. West was recently married, with better-paid script work coming in, and returning from a trip to Mexico. Distraught over hearing of his friend's Fitzgerald's death, he crashed his car after ignoring a stop sign.

West considered himself an outsider. He believed that society was decaying, and the American dream is a sad, monstrous myth. He wrote only four books, of which only The Day of the Locust was a success.

For further reading: Nathanael West by S.E. Hyman (1962); The Fiction of Nathanael West by R. Reid (1967); Nathanael West by J. Martin (1970); Nathanael West: A Collection of Critical Essays by J.F. Light (1971, rev. ed.); Nathanael West's Novels by I Malin (1972); Nathanael West, ed. by D. Madden (1973); Nathanael West by K. Widmer (1982); Nathanael West by R.E. Long (1985); Nathanael West, ed. by H. Bloom (1986); Nathanael West's Miss Lonelyhearts, ed. by H. Bloom (1987); The Writings of Nathanael West by A. Wisker (1990); Critical Essays on Nathanael West, ed. by Ben Siegel(1994); The Great Depression and the Culture of Abundance by Rita Barnard (1995); American Superrealism: Nathanael West and the Politics of Representation in the 1930s by Jonathan Veitch (1997) - Note: Eileen McKenney is the main subject of Ruth McKenney's book My Sister Eileen (1938). - American writers in Hollywood in the 1930s and 1940s: James M. Cain, Raymond Chandler, John Fante, Daniel Fuchs, Horace McCoy, Clifford Odets, Maxwell Anderson, Dorothy Parker, John Don Passos, Theodore Dreiser, Dashiell Hammett, William Faulkner, F. Scott Fitzgerald.

Five Came Back (1939) - dir. by John Farrow, starring Chester Morris, Lucille Ball, C. Aubrey Smith, Elisabeth Risdon, Wendy Barrie, John Carradine, Joseph Calleia, Allen Jenkins, Kent Taylor, Patric Konowles. Screenplay by Nathanael West, Jerry Cody, Dalton Trumbo. - The story, an original of Richard Carroll, concerns a planeload of twelve passengers forced down in the head-hunter-infested Amazon jungle. In the extremely threatening situation the varied traits of the passengers come to the surface. When the plane is repaired, it is found that it can carry only five survivors, and head-hunters are coming closer... The script was assigned from Jerry Cady, former radio writer, to Dalton Trumbo, who retained most of West's work while discarding Cady's and adding touches of his own, notably building the character of an anarchist, played by Carradine, into a sympathetic one, in contrast to West's conception. - Five Came Back established John Farrow as a director. The film gained critical success and gradually achieved a cult status. Later the story was remade as Back to Eternity (1956) and provided the starting point for many variations, among them The Flight of the Phoenix (1965), dir. by Robert Aldrich and based on Elleston Trevor's novel.

THE DREAM LIFE OF BALSO SNELL, (1931)