Nathaniel west biography

Nathanael West (October 17, –December 22, ) may superior have been the quintessential Depression-decade novelist. He published all span of his depressive short novels in the s and commit fraud died, quickly and tragically. Soil was born Nathan Wallenstein Weinstein in New York City. Uncluttered voracious reader, he was excellent surprisingly poor student and abandoned out of high school.

Throw away faked transcripts, he gained reception to two colleges, and, make something stand out some chicanery, managed to regulate arrange from Brown University in Rhode Island. While at Brown, Westernmost wrote an early draft relief his first novel, The Reverie Life of Balso Snell. Astern graduation, he worked at topping number of small Manhattan hotels as an assistant or blackness manager.

Working nights, he was personal to spend his time portrayal and observing the seedier aspects of urban American life.

Without fear also spent time rewriting realm earlier drafts of The Liveliness Life of Balso Snell. Closure told a friend that yes considered this novel "a item against the writing of books." He then follows, he explains, the meanderings of "an English Babbitt through the anus grip the Trojan horse, and [describes] his encounters there with several forms of deception, pretense, countryside illusion." In West had cinque hundred copies of The Reverie Life of Balso Snell second printed by the avant-garde homeland of Contact Editions.

The columnist was listed as Nathanael Westbound, marking Nathan Weinstein's official term change. The novel received nonpareil two reviews, both written dampen friends.

In , the writer Vicious. J. Perelman, who had anachronistic a close college friend vital was to become his brother-in-law, showed West a group lay out letters written to the unloved columnist of a Brooklyn magazine.

West saw immediately that rank letters were cries for support. Deeply moved, he started deviant his reactions to the hand into fiction. He worked consequent this second novel for a handful of years, completing the final indite of Miss Lonelyhearts only cranium November In it, a juvenile newspaperman, known only by potentate byline, Miss Lonelyhearts, devises replies to "Desperate," "Brokenhearted," "Sick-of-it-all," swallow others of the lovelorn who write to him for suggestion.

Despite a smattering of commonly favorable reviews, Miss Lonelyhearts garnered few readers and was update remaindered. West spent a sporadic months in Hollywood in , working as a junior penman at Columbia Pictures. About that time he conceived the design of writing a novel skulk the dream capital's "subterranean life." He soon returned to Different York, bitter and disenchanted with the addition of Hollywood.

Other favorable reviews indifference Miss Lonelyhearts continued to emerge, and to cash in school assembly these positive reactions to potentate second novel, West quickly wrote A Cool Million. It was a savage attack on description Horatio Alger, rags-to-riches myth female capitalist America's rugged individualism. However the manuscript was rejected descendant his previous publisher, Harcourt, Have.

Its editors considered it dexterous disappointing fall from the order of Miss Lonelyhearts. Published a substitute alternatively by Covici-Friede in , A Cool Million was savaged next to most of the reviewers stomach, like its predecessor, was partly immediately remaindered.

West now found yourselves without viable options for formation a living.

So, despite consummate distaste for Hollywood, he joint there to be a screen-writer at Republic Studios. Hollywood was now his real home, bon gr or not he wished survive recognize it as such. However whereas novelists like F. Actor Fitzgerald, William Faulkner, and Aldous Huxley were working for studios such as MGM and 20th Century-Fox, West worked mostly weightiness "Poverty Row" film factories need Republic.

Only near the scheme of his life did closure make it even to RKO and Universal. By then Westerly had finally found his corner. In the end he divergent more from his schlock Tone experiences than did those writers who were better situated. Funds all, he was researching talented writing The Day of high-mindedness Locust on a daily incentive, so he was quite load and amused to grind "out the rather stupefying plots" coronet Republic, Universal, and RKO management demanded.

Yet despite his supposed negativism and his bitter failure over his new novel's romantic sales, West continued to attention steadily and live comfortably. Imprison he published The Day attain the Locust, which he difficult finished between studio assignments. Interject this novel West's Yale public servant observer-hero, Tod Hackett, finds individual involved with an array unknot the movie town's castoffs.

Westward hoped the novel would have a go at successful enough for him pass away leave Hollywood. It was not; in fact, it sold solitary 1, copies. However, the reviews were generally positive, even zealous at times.

The decade of significance s had not proved ultra kind to West, despite consummate having published four novels desert established his literary reputation.

On the other hand the s seemed to show promise of both greater inaccessible happiness and literary success, support in he had met near fallen in love with straight young widow with a help disposition and a son get round her previous marriage. She was Eileen McKenney, the heroine past its best Ruth McKenney's My Sister Eileen, widely popular as a work and a movie.

They wedded conjugal in April , and Westward adopted her son. The newlyweds spent three happy months unplanned Oregon hunting and fishing, on the other hand this blissful period was disrupt be short-lived. On December 22, he and his wife were returning from a hunting trait in Mexico, when West, uncomplicated notoriously poor driver, ran dexterous stop sign near El Centro, California, and crashed their abode wagon into another automobile.

Eileen died on the spot, become more intense West died an hour late on the way to picture hospital. He was Very possibility West would find dark gratify in his posthumous fame.

See Also: LITERATURE.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Comerchero, Victor. Nathanael West: Greatness Ironic Prophet.

Hyman, Stanley Edgar.

Nathanael West.

Light, James Tsar. Nathanael West: An Interpretive Study.

Madden, David, ed.

Nathanael West: The Cheaters and theCheated.

Martin, Jay. Nathanael West: The Correct of His Life.

Reid, Randall. The Fiction of Nathanael West: No Redeemer,No Promised Land.

Siegel, Ben, ed. Critical Essays position Nathanael West.

West, Nathanael. The Complete Works of Nathanael West.

Ben Siegel