Nathanael West (October 17th 1903 - December 22nd 1940) is the pen name of the author, scenario writer and American satirist Nathan Wallenstein Weinstein .

Youth

Nathanael West is born with New York, first child of a couple of Jews Russian speaking German and originating in Lithuania which lived in a house of the upper-middle class, in the Jewish district about Upper West Side. West shows little motivation for the studies, giving up the college and managing to be made admit with the Université of Tufts only by counterfeiting its report card. After its expulsion of Tufts, West between to the University Brown by adapting the bulletin of a fellow student in Tufts being also called Nathan Weinstein. Although West studies little in Brown, it reads enormously. He is unaware of the realistic literature of his American contemporaries, his favors going to the surrealist French and the British and Irish poets of the Années 1890, in particular Oscar Wilde. West is interested by the not very common styles and literary contents. It is also interested in the Christianisme and with the Mysticisme as objects of experiments and expression of the literature and Article the comrades of West with Brown call it “Pep” (“dynamism”): one does not know that indicates that West posted a great physical energy or (in the sarcastic tradition of many nicknames) extreme opposite. Since the Jewish students were not allowed in associations of students, his/her best friend was his future brother-in-law Sidney Joseph Perelman, who was to become one of the comic authors more the scholars of America.

West leaves the University hardly graduate. It leaves then to Paris in 1925 per three months when it changes its name into Nathanael West. The family of West, which supported it up to that point by far, knows financial problems at the end of the Années 1920. West turns over at his place and works sporadically in construction for his/her father, finally finding a work of person in charge of night in Kenmore Hotel located at East 23rd Street, with Manhattan. One of the experiments lived by West in this hotel directly inspired the account of the incident between Romola Martin and Homer Simpson appearing in the fire of Los Angeles (appeared in 1939).

Career of author

Although West writes from the University, it is only since this night-work of any rest to the hotel that it finds time to be devoted to its novel. It is at that time that written West what will become finally Miss Lonelyhearts (1933). In 1931, two years before it supplements Miss Lonelyhearts , West publishes off The Dream Life Balso Snell , a novel designed at the University. In parallel, West works in a group of writers in and around New York, in particular with William Carlos Williams and Dashiell Hammett.

In 1933, West buys a farm in the south of the Pennsylvania, but soon finds an use of scenario writer for Columbia Pictures and settles with Hollywood. It publishes a third novel, has Cool Million, in 1934. None of these three books of West is sold and he knows, in the middle of the years 1930, of the financial problems, collaborating by far in far with scenarios. Many films to which he works belong to the series B, like Five Came Back (1939). It is at that time that West written the fire of Los Angeles , which is published in 1939.

Died

West and his new wife, Eileen McKenney, die on December 22nd, 1940 in an car accident, one day after his/her friend Francis Scott Fitzgerald died of an heart attack. West was always a very bad conductive, and many his/her friends (in particular Perelman) always refused to go up by car when West led. The rumor wants that the car accident which cost the life Nathanael West and his wife was caused by the non-observance of a stop by the overpowered author of pain after the death of his/her friend. Eileen McKenney was the subject of the book My Sister Eileen , written in 1938 by his/her older sister, Ruth McKenney. Nathanael West and Eileen McKenney are buried with the cemetery of Mount Zion, in the Queens, with New York.

Work

West was relatively ignored of sound living and its notoriety grows only after its death, in particular with the publication of its complete works in 1957. Miss Lonelyhearts is mainly looked like its masterpiece and the fire of Los Angeles , written during the first years in Hollywood, remains one of its best novels. It is often compared with the unfinished novel of Francis Scott Fitzgerald, the Last Nabob , is written at the same time whereas this last also lives in Hollywood. If one belongs to a family of authors who employ “black humor” in their texts of fiction, West can be regarded as the successor of Nicolas Gogol and Edgar Allan Poe, and the precursor of Saul Bellow, Vladimir Nabokov and Martin Amis.

The major part of the fictions of West are, in a direction, an answer to the Grande Depression which America knows after the crash of Wall Street in October 1929 and which continues in the Thirties. The decorations obscenes and yelling of the fire of Los Angeles are drawn up in opposition to the dull misery in which the remainder of the country lives at that time. According to West, the American dream was betrayed at the same time spiritually and materially during the years of economic depression. This idea of the corruption of the dream of the pioneers of the American west will continue a long time after its death: indeed, the poet W.H. Auden invents the term of “disease of West” in reference to the poverty which exists at the same time in a spiritual and economic direction.

Works published

  • 1931 : Life dreamed of Balso Snell (The Dream Life off Balso Snell)
  • 1933: Miss Heart-Broken (Lonelyhearts Miss)
  • 1934: a very round million (Cool Million has)
  • 1939: the Fire of Los Angeles (The Day off the Locust)

Film adaptations

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