Nathanael west biography

Nathanael West was an American writer and screenwriter.
Nathanael West was an American writer best known for satiric novels of the 1930s.
Born Nathan Weinstein, the author of the classics Miss Lonelyhearts (1933) and The Day of the Locust (1939) was an uncompromising artist obsessed with writing.

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Nathanael West: A Novelist Apart

Books

Few American authors of our time have had such critical acclaim and so little popular success as Nathanael West. Now ten years after his death in an automobile accident, the curious, original vitality of two of his books, Miss Lonelyhearts andThe Day of the Locust, is still making itself felt. The latter title, described by some critics as the best novel to come out of Hollywood. has just been reissued in the New Classics Series by the New Directions Press. RICHARD B. GERMAN has drawn from his Introduction the following account of west and his work.

By Richard B. Gehman

by RICHARD B. GERMAN

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NATHANAEL WEST, who died in 1940 at the age of thirty-six, published four curious, highly original novels during the thirties, of which the second, Miss Lonelyhearts, and the fourth, The Day of the Locust (both in the New Directions New Classics series), are generally considered the most likely to survive. The others, The Dream Life of Balso Snell (the first) and A Cool Million, are no longer in print, but they c

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Born as Nathan Weinstein, the only son of a wealthy Manhattan real estate developer, West grew up as an overly spoiled child, largely burdened by the belief that he shouldn't be expected to work or show up on time or in any other way trouble himself to get by in the world. The Depression did a lot to revise this attitude. There is abundant evidence as to the domineering nature of his Russian Jewish mother in his novels along with sexual ambiguity (although he seems to have favored female prostitutes, given his numerous bouts with gonorrhea). As a child, West was enthralled by Russian novels and decided to pursue a career as an author. To West, a literary career presupposed a life in Paris, the 1920's intellectual Mecca, hanging out with the likes of Joyce and Fitzgerald, but the 4-month trip was largely spent engaging in sexual debauchery while attempting to pass himself off as a literary flaneur. Upon his return to New York, West failed miserably at writing, his short stories were continually rejected by magazines, his first novel had minuscule run of 500 copies (sales

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West, Nathanael

The satiric genius Nathanael West was born Nathan Weinstein and died, aged thirty-seven, before his work met with the kind of critical acclaim it deserved. “Do I love what others love?,” a motto from the German poet Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, is inscribed below the drawing of a man hugging a mule in the bookplate that his friend, the writer S. J. Perelman, designed for West while they were still at college. In fact, West, in his brief life, did not, it seems, love what most others loved.

His posthumous reputation rests on four short and devastatingly funny, bleakly surrealist, satirical novels. His debut novel, The Dream Life of Balso Snell (1931), is a virtuoso satiric parody of the cult of high modernism, whose techniques he refines to powerful effect in the anticapitalist, antifascist satires Miss Lonelyhearts (1933), A Cool Million (1934), and The Day of the Locust (1939). Edgar Allan Poe and Charles Baudelaire were his muses. West scorned what he called the “muddle-class” realism of Sinclair Lewis and Theodore Dreiser and championed the formally experime