Nathanael West
Personal Information
Description
Nathan Wallenstein Weinstein was born in 1903 in New York City. He attended Brown University and from 1924 to 1931 he lived in Paris, where he wrote The Dream Life of Balso Snell. On his return to New York, he managed a residential hotel and was associate editor, with [William Carlos Williams]( of the magazine Contact. Miss Lonelyhearts appeared in 1933, A Cool Million in 1934 and The Day of the Locust in 1939. He worked on film scripts in Hollywood for the last five years of his life. He and his wife were tragically killed in a car accident in 1940. --Penguin Books Photo --Wikicommons
Books
Miss Lonelyhearts
"A newspaper reporter assigned to write the agony column in the depths of the Great Depression seeks respite from the poor souls who send in their sad letters, only to be further tormented by his viciously cynical editor, Shrike. This edition of Miss Lonelyhearts features the original New Directions cover by Alvin Lustig, as well as a new introduction by Harold Bloom, who calls the novel 'my favorite work of modern American fiction.'"--Cover, page
The Day of the Locust
Following the tale of Tod Hackett - a brilliant young artist who is brought to an LA studio as a set designer - 'The Day of the Locust' is an exposure of the sordid reality beneath the surface of Hollywood.
The Dream Life of Balso Snell ; A Cool Million
" Nathanael West was only thirty-seven when he died in 1940, but his depictions of the sometimes comic, sometimes horrifying aspects of the American scene rival those of William Faulkner and Flannery O'Connor. A Cool Million, written in 1934, is a satiric Horatio Alger story set in the midst of the Depression. The Dream Life of Balso Snell (1931) was described by one critic as "a fantasy about some rather scatological adventures of the hero in the innards of the Trojan horse."--Publisher's website.
Miss Lonelyhearts & The Day of the Locust
"Somehow or other I seem to have slipped in between all the 'schools,'" observed Nathanael West the year before his untimely death in 1940. "My books meet no needs except my own, their circulation is practically private and I'm lucky to be published." Yet today, West is widely recognized as a prophetic writer whose dark and comic vision of a society obsessed with mass-produced fantasies foretold much of what was to come in American life. Miss Lonelyhearts (1933), which West envisioned as "a novel in the form of a comic strip," tells of an advice-to-the-lovelorn columnist who becomes tragically embroiled in the desperate lives of his readers. The Day of the Locust (1939) is West's great dystopian Hollywood novel based on his experiences at the seedy fringes of the movie industry.