A short life of the author
Nathanael West — born Nathan Weinstein (17 October 1903 – 22 December 1940) — was an American novelist who produced four short, ferocious, formally innovative novels in the 1930s, all of them commercial failures, and died in a car crash at thirty-seven, one day after the death of his friend F. Scott Fitzgerald. His posthumous reputation has grown steadily, and Miss Lonelyhearts (1933) and The Day of the Locust (1939) are now recognised as masterpieces of American fiction — savage, compressed, darkly comic works that anatomise the violence, despair, and spiritual emptiness at the heart of American mass culture.
Life
West was born in New York City to Lithuanian Jewish immigrant parents. He changed his name from Nathan Weinstein in his early twenties — a characteristically deliberate act of self-reinvention. He attended Tufts University briefly and then Brown University (gaining admission, it is believed, through a clerical mix-up with another student’s transcript), where he was a diffident student but a voracious reader of the European avant-garde, particularly the French Surrealists.
After college, he spent two years in Paris (1926–1927), absorbing Surrealism, Dada, and the modernist literary scene. Back in New York, he managed the Sutton Hotel and later the Hotel Kenmore Hall, where he provided free or reduced-rate rooms to struggling writers, including Dashiell Hammett, Erskine Caldwell, and James T. Farrell. He worked as a screenwriter in Hollywood from the mid-1930s, an experience that provided the material for The Day of the Locust.
He married Eileen McKenney (the model for Ruth McKenney’s bestselling My Sister Eileen) in April 1940. Eight months later, on 22 December 1940, both were killed when West ran a stop sign near El Centro, California, while returning from a hunting trip in Mexico. F. Scott Fitzgerald had died the previous day; the two men were linked in death as they had been in life — both commercial failures who would be rediscovered and canonised by a later generation.
Miss Lonelyhearts (1933)
West’s masterpiece — a novel of approximately 25,000 words — tells the story of a male newspaper columnist who writes an advice column for the desperate and suffering under the pen name “Miss Lonelyhearts.” The letters he receives — from “Desperate,” “Sick-of-it-all,” “Broad Shoulders” — are so raw in their depictions of poverty, illness, sexual violence, and hopelessness that Miss Lonelyhearts is driven to a spiritual crisis. He seeks redemption through Christ-like identification with the suffering of others, but his attempt at religious salvation is doomed by his own weakness and by the irremediable cruelty of the world.
The novel is written in a compressed, almost hallucinatory prose that owes as much to Surrealism as to American realism. Its imagery — the desert landscape, the stone, the lamb — carries a symbolic weight that borders on allegory without ever resolving into one. The novel’s ending — violent, ambiguous, grimly comic — is one of the most shocking in American fiction.
The Day of the Locust (1939)
West’s Hollywood novel follows Tod Hackett, a set designer for a major studio, through the lower depths of 1930s Los Angeles: the bit players, the extras, the failed actresses, the religious cranks, the sexual predators, and — most importantly — the people who have come to California to die. These are the “cheated” — ordinary Americans who have followed the dream of sunshine and leisure to its logical conclusion and have found nothing. The novel culminates in a riot at a movie premiere that is simultaneously a realistic depiction of mob violence and an apocalyptic vision of American civilisation consuming itself.
The novel’s final image — a painting Tod is working on, titled “The Burning of Los Angeles” — is one of the defining metaphors of American cultural criticism.
The Other Novels
The Dream Life of Balso Snell (1931), West’s first novel, is a Surrealist fantasy set inside the Trojan Horse — a scatological, parodic, deliberately offensive work that anticipates his later themes. A Cool Million (1934) is a savage parody of the Horatio Alger rags-to-riches narrative, in which the optimistic young Lemuel Pitkin is systematically dismembered by the American system he trusts.
Rediscovery and Influence
West sold virtually no books during his lifetime. Miss Lonelyhearts was published the week its publisher went bankrupt; copies were impounded by creditors. A Cool Million received dismissive reviews. The Day of the Locust sold fewer than 1,500 copies. His complete works could be read in a single day. Only after his death — through the advocacy of critics like Edmund Wilson and the 1957 publication of The Complete Works of Nathanael West — did his reputation begin to rise. By the 1960s he was canonical.
His influence is visible in every American writer who has explored the violence and kitsch beneath the American dream: Flannery O’Connor’s grotesque South, Thomas Pynchon’s paranoid California, Don DeLillo’s media-saturated America, and David Lynch’s nightmarish Hollywood all owe debts to West. He demonstrated that the American novel could be short, savage, formally experimental, and devastatingly funny — that compression and intensity could achieve effects impossible for the realistic novel of social observation.
Collecting West
Miss Lonelyhearts (1933, Liveright) in first edition is a major rarity, bringing $2,000–$10,000 with dust jacket. The Day of the Locust (1939, Random House) brings $1,000–$5,000. The Dream Life of Balso Snell (1931, Contact Editions, limited to 500 copies) brings $1,000–$4,000. West’s books had tiny print runs and are genuinely scarce.