Nathanael west biography of barack

American novelist

For the actor, see Nathan West. For the character, see Nathan West (General Hospital).

"Nathaniel West" redirects sagacity. For the captain, see Nathaniel Westside (captain).

Nathanael West (born Nathan Weinstein; October 17, 1903 – Dec 22, 1940) was an American author and screenwriter.^[1] He is remembered insinuate two darkly satirical novels: Miss Lonelyhearts (1933) and The Day of honesty Locust (1939), set respectively in honourableness newspaper and Hollywood film industries.

Early life

Nathanael West was born Nathan Weinstein in New York City, the chief child of Ashkenazi Jewish parents Failure (Morduch) Weinstein (1878–1932) and Anuta (Anna, née Wallenstein, 1878–1935),^[2] from Kovno, Land (present-day Kaunas, Lithuania), who maintained be over upper middle class household in regular Jewish neighborhood on the Upper Westbound Side. West displayed little ambition bay academics, dropping out of high secondary and only gaining admission into Tufts College by forging his high grammar transcript.^[3]

After being expelled from Tufts, Westbound got into Brown University by plagiarizing the transcript of a fellow Tufts student, his cousin, Nathan Weinstein. Even though West did little schoolwork at Chocolatebrown, he read extensively. He ignored righteousness realist fiction of his American begetting in favor of French surrealists highest British and Irish poets of ethics 1890s, in particular Oscar Wilde. West's interests emphasized unusual literary style style well as unusual content. He became interested in Christianity and mysticism though experienced or expressed through literature stall art.^[4]

West's friends at Camp Paradox, wonderful summer camp in Adirondack, New Dynasty, nicknamed him Pep in ironic glut to his somnolent disposition.^[5] West certain and made fun of his deficiency of physical prowess in recounting greatness story of a baseball game situation he cost his team the play. Wells Root, a close friend pointer West, remembers hearing this tale one-half a dozen times, recalling that globe everybody had placed bets on the recreation, which came down to the concluding inning with the score tied captain the enemy at bat with span outs. At that point the pound 1 hit a long fly towards West;

He put his hands up egg on catch it and for some inscrutable reason didn't hold them close packed in. The ball tore through, hit him in the forehead, and bounced smash into some brush. There was a howl from the crowd and [West] took one look and turned tail. Acquiescent a man, the crowd had risen, gathered bats, sticks, stones, and anything they could lay hands on scold were in hot pursuit. He disappeared into some woods and didn't show up until nightfall. In telling the free spirit he was convinced that if they had caught him they would possess killed him.^[6]

It is unclear whether that ever 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 unconventional brother-in-law S.J. Perelman. (Perelman married West's sister Laura.) West barely finished look after Brown with a degree. He next went to Paris for three months, and it was at this firmly that he changed his name set upon Nathanael West. His family, who difficult to understand supported him thus far, ran smash into financial difficulties during the late Twenties. West returned home and worked rarely in construction for his father, one of these days finding a job as the inaccurate manager of the Hotel Kenmore Entrance hall on East 23rd Street in Borough. One of West's experiences at interpretation hotel inspired the incident between Romola Martin and Homer Simpson that arised in his novel The Day be required of the Locust (1939).^[7]

In 1933 he was employed as the manager of rank Sutton Hotel in New York Permeate, located at 330 E. 56th Street.^[8]

Author

Although West had been working on diadem writing since college, it was bawl until his quiet night job view the hotel that he found nobility time to put his novel peak. It was then that he wrote what became Miss Lonelyhearts (1933). Byword Lieber served as his literary emissary in 1933. In 1931, however, deuce years before he completed Miss Lonelyhearts, West published The Dream Life describe Balso Snell, a novel that oversight started in college. By then, Westside was within a group of writers working in and around New Dynasty City that included William Carlos Clergyman and Dashiell Hammett.^{[citation needed]}

In 1933, Westernmost bought a farm in eastern Penn, but he soon got a experienced as a contract scriptwriter for Town Pictures and moved to Hollywood. Smartness published a A Cool Million end in 1934. None of West's three scrunch up sold well, earning him less ahead of $800, so he spent the mid-1930s in financial difficulty,^[9] sporadically collaborating deal screenplays. Many of the films unquestionable worked on were B movies, specified as Five Came Back (1939). Impassion was at this time that appease wrote The Day of the Locust. He took many of the settings and minor characters of his new directly from his experience living put into operation a hotel on Hollywood Boulevard.^{[citation needed]}

In November 1939, West was hired bit a screenwriter by RKO Radio Movies, where he collaborated with Boris Ingster on a film adaptation of description novel Before the Fact (1932) disrespect Francis Iles. West and Ingster wrote the screenplay in seven weeks, additional West focusing on characterization and review and Ingster focusing on the narration structure.

RKO assigned the film, at last released as Suspicion (1941), to Aelfred Hitchcock; but Hitchcock already had fillet own, substantially different, screenplay. Hitchcock's dramatic art was written by Samson Raphaelson, Joan Harrison (Hitchcock's secretary), and Alma Reville (Hitchcock's wife). West and Ingster's theatre was abandoned, but the text stool be found in the Library late America's edition of West's collected works.^[10]

Death

On December 22, 1940, West and coronet wife Eileen McKenney were returning cut into Los Angeles from a hunting conversation in Mexico. West ran a halt sign in El Centro, California, second-hand consequenti in a collision in which pacify and McKenney were killed. (Their deaths occurred the day after that regard their friend F. Scott Fitzgerald.) McKenney had been the inspiration for distinction title character in the Broadway hurl My Sister Eileen, and she splendid West had been scheduled to sweep to New York City for birth Broadway opening on December 26.^[11]

West was buried in Mount Zion Cemetery control Queens, New York, with his wife's ashes placed in his coffin.^{[citation needed]}

His work

Although West was not widely acknowledged during his life, his reputation grew after his death, especially with honourableness publication of his collected novels close to New Directions in 1957. Miss Lonelyhearts is widely regarded as West's masterwork. Day of the Locust was plain into a film which came rupture in 1975. 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.^[12]

The obscene, brummagem landscapes of The Day of justness Locust gained force in light commandeer the fact that the remainder sell like hot cakes the country was living in dreary poverty at the time. Though Westerly attended socialist rallies in New Royalty City's Union Square, his novels be endowed with no affinity to the novels appropriate his contemporary activist writers such kind John Steinbeck and John Dos Passos. West's writing style does not bear the portrayal of positive political causes, as he admitted in a character to Malcolm Cowley regarding The Age of the Locust: "I tried pop in describe a meeting of the anti-Nazi league, but it didn't fit leading I had to substitute a edifice and a dirty film".^[13]

West saw interpretation American dream as having been betrayed, both spiritually and materially, and seep out his writing he presented "a general rejection of political causes, religious confidence, artistic redemption and romantic love".^[14] That idea of the corrupt American day-dream endured long after his death, impede the form of the term "West's disease", coined by the poet W.H. Auden to refer to poverty put off exists in both a spiritual refuse economic sense. Jay Martin wrote breath extensive biography of West in 1970. Another biography, Lonelyhearts: The Screwball Environment of Nathanael West and Eileen McKenney, by Marion Meade was published comprise 2010.^[15]

Published works

Main article: Bibliography of Nathanael West

Novels

Plays

Short stories

Posthumous collections

• Bercovitch, Sacvan, ed. Nathanael West, Novels and Other Writings (Library of America, 1997) ISBN 978-1-883011-28-4

Screenplays

References

Further reading

• Martin, Jay, Nathanael West: The Art of His Life (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1970)
• Meade, Marion, Lonelyhearts: The Screwball World carry out Nathanael West and Eileen McKenney (New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2010)
• Seguin, Parliamentarian. "New Frontiers in Hollywood: Mobility countryside Desire in The Day of say publicly Locust". Around Quitting Time: Work skull Middle-Class Fantasy in American Fiction. Durham: Duke University Press, 2001, pp. 83–119.
• Woodward, Joe, Alive Inside the Wreck: A Humanity of Nathanael West (New York: Union Books, 2011)

External links

• Works by Nathanael Westside at Faded Page (Canada)
• Nathanael West articulate IMDb
• Petri Liukkonen. "Nathanael West". Books bear 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,
• Nathanael Westernmost at Find a Grave
• Profile, Library goods America website
• Promotional website for Lonelyhearts: Birth Screwball World of Nathanael West presentday Eileen McKenney,
• Works by Nathanael Westernmost at LibriVox (public domain audiobooks)
• "The Day of the Locust," BBC Wireless 3 Sunday Feature (February 2015)