Nathanael West

Nathanael West (1903–1940) was an American novelist, born Nathan Wallenstein Weinstein in New York City to Jewish immigrant parents from Lithuania. After Brown University and a few months in Paris, he worked as a night manager of New York hotels, where he let struggling writer friends stay for free. His short, darkly comic novels, The Dream Life of Balso Snell (1931), Miss Lonelyhearts (1933), about a newspaper agony columnist overwhelmed by his readers’ suffering, and A Cool Million (1934), sold poorly in his lifetime. He moved to Hollywood to write screenplays for minor studios, an experience that fed into The Day of the Locust (1939). In 1940 he married Eileen McKenney, and that December the two were killed in a car crash in California, the day after the death of his friend F. Scott Fitzgerald. His reputation grew steadily after his death.