Nathanael West - Wikipedia Nathanael West From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Jump to navigation Jump to search For the Virginia politician, see Nathaniel West (captain). For the actor, see Nathan West. For the character, see Nathan West (General Hospital). This article needs additional citations for verification. Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. Find sources: "Nathanael West" – news · newspapers · books · scholar · JSTOR (July 2008) (Learn how and when to remove this template message) Nathanael West Born Nathan Weinstein (1903-10-17)October 17, 1903 New York City, New York, US Died December 22, 1940(1940-12-22) (aged 37) El Centro, California, US Resting place Mount Zion Cemetery, Queens, New York, US Occupation Novelist, screenwriter Language English Nationality American Citizenship American Alma mater Brown University Notable works Miss Lonelyhearts, The Day of the Locust Spouse Eileen McKenney (1940) Nathanael West (born Nathan Weinstein; October 17, 1903 – December 22, 1940) was an American author and screenwriter.[1] He is remembered for two darkly satirical novels: Miss Lonelyhearts (1933) and The Day of the Locust (1939), set respectively in the newspaper and Hollywood film industries. Contents 1 Early life 2 Author 3 Death 4 His work 5 Published works 5.1 Novels 5.2 Plays 5.3 Short stories 5.4 Posthumous collections 6 Screenplays 7 References 8 Further reading 9 External links Early life[edit] Nathanael West was born Nathan Weinstein in New York City, the first child of Ashkenazi Jewish parents, Anuta (Anna, née Wallenstein, 1878–1935) and Max (Morduch) Weinstein (1878–1932),[2] from Kovno, Russia (present-day Kaunas, Lithuania), who maintained an upper middle class household in a Jewish neighborhood on the Upper West Side. West displayed little ambition in academics, dropping out of high school and only gaining admission into Tufts College by forging his high school transcript.[3] After being expelled from Tufts, West got into Brown University by appropriating the transcript of a fellow Tufts student, his cousin, Nathan Weinstein. Although West did little schoolwork at Brown, he read extensively. He ignored the realist fiction of his American contemporaries in favor of French surrealists and British and Irish poets of the 1890s, in particular Oscar Wilde. West's interests focused on unusual literary style as well as unusual content. He became interested in Christianity and mysticism, as experienced or expressed through literature and art.[4] West's classmates at Brown nicknamed him "Pep" after a school trip where after only a few minutes of walking he quickly ran out of breath. West himself acknowledged and made fun of his lack of physical prowess in recounting the story of a baseball game where he cost his team the game. Wells Root, a close friend of West, remembers hearing this tale half a dozen times, recalling that everyone had placed bets on the game, which came down to the final inning with the score tied and the enemy at bat with two outs. At that point the batter hit a long fly towards West; He put his hands up to catch it and for some inexplicable reason didn't hold them close together. The ball tore through, hit him in the forehead, and bounced into some brush. There was a roar from the crowd and [West] took one look and turned tail. To a man, the crowd had risen, gathered bats, sticks, stones, and anything they could lay hands on and were in hot pursuit. He vanished into some woods and didn't emerge until nightfall. In telling the story he was convinced that if they had caught him they would have killed him.[5] It is unclear whether this ever actually happened, but West later re-imagined this in his short story "Western Union Boy". As Jewish students were not allowed to join most fraternities, his main friend was his future brother-in-law S. J. Perelman. (Perelman married West's sister Laura.) West barely finished at Brown with a degree. He then went to Paris for three months, and it was at this point that he changed his name to Nathanael West. His family, who had supported him thus far, ran into financial difficulties in the late 1920s. West returned home and worked sporadically in construction for his father, eventually finding a job as the night manager of the Hotel Kenmore Hall on East 23rd Street in Manhattan. One of West's real-life experiences at the hotel inspired the incident between Romola Martin and Homer Simpson that would later appear in The Day of the Locust (1939).[6] Author[edit] Although West had been working on his writing since college, it was not until his quiet night job at the hotel that he found the time to put his novel together. It was then that West wrote what would eventually become Miss Lonelyhearts (1933). Maxim Lieber served as his literary agent in 1933. In 1931, however, two years before he completed Miss Lonelyhearts, West published The Dream Life of Balso Snell, a novel that he had conceived of in college. By then, West was within a group of writers working in and around New York City that included William Carlos Williams and Dashiell Hammett.[citation needed] In 1933, West bought a farm in eastern Pennsylvania but soon got a job as a contract scriptwriter for Columbia Pictures and moved to Hollywood. He published a third novel, A Cool Million, in 1934. None of West's three works sold well, earning him less than $800, so he spent the mid-1930s in financial difficulty,[7] sporadically collaborating on screenplays. Many of the films he worked on were B movies, such as Five Came Back (1939). It was at this time that West wrote The Day of the Locust. He took many of the settings and minor characters of his novel directly from his experience living in a hotel on Hollywood Boulevard.[citation needed] In November 1939, West was hired as a screenwriter by RKO Radio Pictures, where he collaborated with Boris Ingster on a film adaptation of the novel Before the Fact (1932) by Francis Iles. West and Ingster wrote the screenplay in seven weeks, with West focusing on characterization and dialogue and Ingster focusing on the narrative structure. RKO assigned the film, eventually released as Suspicion (1941), to Alfred Hitchcock; but Hitchcock already had his own, substantially different, screenplay. Hitchcock's screenplay was written by Samson Raphaelson, Joan Harrison (Hitchcock's secretary), and Alma Reville (Hitchcock's wife). West and Ingster's screenplay was abandoned, but the text can be found in the Library of America's edition of West's collected works.[citation needed] Death[edit] On December 22, 1940, West and his wife Eileen McKenney were returning to Los Angeles from a hunting trip in Mexico. West ran a stop sign in El Centro, California, resulting in a collision in which he and McKenney were killed. (Their deaths occurred the day after that of their friend F. Scott Fitzgerald.) McKenney had been the inspiration for the title character in the Broadway play My Sister Eileen, and she and West had been scheduled to fly to New York City for the Broadway opening on December 26.[8] West was buried in Mount Zion Cemetery in Queens, New York, with his wife's ashes placed in his coffin.[citation needed] His work[edit] Although West was not widely known during his life, his reputation grew after his death, especially with the publication of his collected novels by New Directions in 1957. Miss Lonelyhearts is widely regarded as West's masterpiece. Day of the Locust was made into a film which came out in 1975, starring Donald Sutherland and Karen Black. Likewise Miss Lonelyhearts (1933) saw production in film (1933, 1958, 1983), stage (1957), and operatic (2006) versions; and the character "Miss Lonelyhearts" in Hitchcock's film Rear Window has parallels to West's work.[9] The obscene, garish landscapes of The Day of the Locust gained force in light of the fact that the remainder of the country was living in drab poverty at the time. Though West attended socialist rallies in New York City's Union Square, his novels have no affinity to the novels of his contemporary activist writers such as John Steinbeck and John Dos Passos. West's writing style does not allow the portrayal of positive political causes, as he admitted in a letter to Malcolm Cowley regarding The Day of the Locust: "I tried to describe a meeting of the anti-Nazi league, but it didn't fit and I had to substitute a whorehouse and a dirty film".[10] West saw the American dream as having been betrayed, both spiritually and materially, and in his writing he presented "a sweeping rejection of political causes, religious faith, artistic redemption and romantic love".[11] This idea of the corrupt American dream endured long after his death, in the form of the term "West's disease", coined by the poet W. H. Auden to refer to poverty that exists in both a spiritual and economic sense. Jay Martin wrote an extensive biography of West in 1970. Another biography, Lonelyhearts: The Screwball World of Nathanael West and Eileen McKenney, by Marion Meade was published in 2010.[citation needed] Published works[edit] Main article: Bibliography of Nathanael West Novels[edit] The Dream Life of Balso Snell (1931) Miss Lonelyhearts (1933) A Cool Million (1934) The Day of the Locust (1939) Plays[edit] Even Stephen (1934, with S. J. Perelman) Good Hunting (1938, with Joseph Schrank) Short stories[edit] "Western Union Boy" "The Imposter" Posthumous collections[edit] Bercovitch, Sacvan, ed. Nathanael West, Novels and Other Writings (Library of America, 1997) ISBN 978-1-883011-28-4 Screenplays[edit] Ticket to Paradise (1936) Follow Your Heart (1936) The President's Mystery (1936) Rhythm in the Clouds (1937) It Could Happen to You (1937) Born to Be Wild (1938) Five Came Back (1939) I Stole a Million (1939) Stranger on the Third Floor (1940) The Spirit of Culver (1940) Men Against the Sky (1940) Let's Make Music (1940) Before the Fact (1940) (unproduced) References[edit] ^ Obituary Variety December 25, 1940. ^ Anuta (Anna) Wallenstein ancestry records ^ Woodward, Joe (2011). Alive Inside the Wreck: A Biography of Nathanael West. New York, London: OR Books. p. 54. ISBN 978-1-935928-38-6. ^ Scheurich, Neil (2006). "Nathanael West's Miss Lonelyhearts and the Problem of Suffering". Pastoral Psychology. 54 (6): 578. doi:10.1007/s11089-006-0026-1. S2CID 143759965. ^ quoted in Martin, Jay. Nathanael West: The Art of His Life. New York: Hayden, 1971, p. 55. ^ Wisker, Alistair. The Writing of Nathanael West. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1990. p.104-106; ISBN 0-333-43823-X ^ Eaton, Mark (2009). "What Price Hollywood? Modern American Writers and the Movies". In Matthews, John T. (ed.). A Companion to the Modern American Novel 1900–1950. Blackwell Publishing Ltd. pp. 466–67. ISBN 978-0-631-20687-3. ^ Profile, nytimes.com, December 21, 2003. ^ Miller, Nicholas Andrew (2013). ""Dear Miss Lonelyhearts": Voyeurism and the Spectacle of Human Suffering in Rear Window". Clues: A Journal of Detection. 31 (1): 45–56. doi:10.3172/CLU.31.1.45. Retrieved April 13, 2013.[permanent dead link] ^ West, Nathanael. Novels & Other Writings. New York: The Library of America, 1997, p. 795. ^ Yaffe, David. "Go West." Partisan Review, 66 (Fall 1999), p. 670. Further reading[edit] Martin, Jay, Nathanael West: The Art of His Life (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1970) Meade, Marion, Lonelyhearts: The Screwball World of Nathanael West and Eileen McKenney (New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2010) Seguin, Robert. "New Frontiers in Hollywood: Mobility and Desire in The Day of the Locust". Around Quitting Time: Work and Middle-Class Fantasy in American Fiction. Durham: Duke University Press, 2001, pp. 83–119. Woodward, Joe, Alive Inside the Wreck: A Life of Nathanael West (New York: OR Books, 2011) External links[edit] Wikisource has original works written by or about: Nathanael West Wikiquote has quotations related to: Nathanael West Works by Nathanael West at Faded Page (Canada) Nathanael West on IMDb Petri Liukkonen. "Nathanael West". Books and Writers Ingrid Norton, "The Nihilism of Nathanael West", Open Letters Monthly (January 2011) Elizabeth Hardwick, "Funny as a Crutch", New York Review of Books, November 6, 2003 Life of Nathanael West, thomaslarson.com Nathanael West at Find a Grave Profile, Library of America website Promotional website for Lonelyhearts: The Screwball World of Nathanael West and Eileen McKenney, nathanaelwest.com Works by Nathanael West at LibriVox (public domain audiobooks) v t e Works by Nathanael West Novels The Dream Life of Balso Snell Miss Lonelyhearts A Cool Million The Day of the Locust Short stories "The Imposter" "Western Union Boy" Plays Good Hunting Even Stephen Screenplays Ticket to Paradise Follow Your Heart The President's Mystery Rhythm in the Clouds It Could Happen to You Born to be Wild Gangs of New York The Spirit of Culver Five Came Back I Stole a Million Stranger on the Third Floor Men Against the Sky Let's Make Music Authority control BIBSYS: 90128670 BNE: XX961019 BNF: cb120137307 (data) CANTIC: a19186915 GND: 118643290 ISNI: 0000 0001 2100 3831 LCCN: n79032209 LNB: 000000299 NDL: 00460648 NKC: jn19981002400 NLA: 35600916 NLI: 001424563 NLK: KAC199629726 NTA: 068497059 PLWABN: 9810536424105606 SELIBR: 101482 SNAC: w6z32dt1 SUDOC: 030606322 Trove: 1010434 VIAF: 31963900 WorldCat Identities: lccn-n79032209 Retrieved from "https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Nathanael_West&oldid=1001961513" Categories: 1940 deaths 1903 births 20th-century American male writers 20th-century American novelists 20th-century American screenwriters American male novelists American people of Lithuanian-Jewish descent American satirical novelists Brown University alumni Burials at Mount Zion Cemetery (New York City) Jewish American novelists Jewish American screenwriters Modernist writers People from Hollywood, Los Angeles People from the Upper West Side Road incident deaths in California Screenwriters from California Writers from Los Angeles Hidden categories: All articles with dead external links Articles with dead external links from February 2018 Articles with permanently dead external links Articles needing additional references from July 2008 All articles needing additional references All articles with unsourced statements Articles with unsourced statements from November 2015 Articles with Project Gutenberg links Articles with LibriVox links Wikipedia articles with BIBSYS identifiers Wikipedia articles with BNE identifiers Wikipedia articles with BNF identifiers Wikipedia articles with CANTIC identifiers Wikipedia articles with GND identifiers Wikipedia articles with ISNI identifiers Wikipedia articles with LCCN identifiers Wikipedia articles with LNB identifiers Wikipedia articles with NDL identifiers Wikipedia articles with NKC identifiers Wikipedia articles with NLA identifiers Wikipedia articles with NLI identifiers Wikipedia articles with NLK identifiers Wikipedia articles with NTA identifiers Wikipedia articles with PLWABN identifiers Wikipedia articles with SELIBR identifiers Wikipedia articles with SNAC-ID identifiers Wikipedia articles with SUDOC identifiers Wikipedia articles with Trove identifiers Wikipedia articles with VIAF identifiers Wikipedia articles with WORLDCATID identifiers Navigation menu Personal tools Not logged in Talk Contributions Create account Log in Namespaces Article Talk Variants Views Read Edit View history More Search Navigation Main page Contents Current events Random article About Wikipedia Contact us Donate Contribute Help Learn to edit Community portal Recent changes Upload file Tools What links here Related changes Upload file Special pages Permanent link Page information Cite this page Wikidata item Print/export Download as PDF Printable version In other projects Wikiquote Wikisource Languages العربية تۆرکجه Català Čeština Deutsch Español Esperanto Euskara فارسی Français Galego Հայերեն Italiano עברית ქართული مصرى Nederlands Norsk bokmål Norsk nynorsk Polski Português Русский Srpskohrvatski / српскохрватски Suomi Svenska Türkçe 中文 Edit links This page was last edited on 22 January 2021, at 04:30 (UTC). 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