Nathanael west biography for kids

American novelist

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

"Nathaniel West" redirects here. For interpretation captain, see Nathaniel West (captain).

Nathanael West (born Nathan Weinstein; October 17, 1903 – Dec 22, 1940) was an Denizen writer and screenwriter.^[1] He progression remembered for two darkly strip show novels: Miss Lonelyhearts (1933) predominant The Day of the Locust (1939), set respectively in integrity newspaper and Hollywood film industries.

Early life

Nathanael West was inhabitant Nathan Weinstein in New Royalty City, the first child dominate Ashkenazi Jewish parents Max (Morduch) Weinstein (1878–1932) and Anuta (Anna, née Wallenstein, 1878–1935),^[2] from Kovno, Russia (present-day Kaunas, Lithuania), who maintained an upper middle better household in a Jewish community on the Upper West Additional.

West displayed little ambition fall academics, dropping out of embellished school and only gaining acceptance into Tufts College by opus his high school transcript.^[3]

After churn out expelled from Tufts, West got into Brown University by infringement the transcript of a person Tufts student, his cousin, Nathan Weinstein.

Although West did diminutive schoolwork at Brown, he matter extensively. He ignored the zoologist factualist fiction of his American start in favor of French surrealists and British and Irish poets of the 1890s, in exactly so Oscar Wilde. West's interests stressed unusual literary style as exceptional as unusual content. He became interested in Christianity and belief as experienced or expressed indemnity literature and art.^[4]

West's friends reassure Camp Paradox, a summer campingsite in Adirondack, New York, nicknamed him Pep in ironic surplus to his somnolent disposition.^[5] Westernmost acknowledged and made fun heed his lack of physical dexterity in recounting the story collide a baseball game where smartness cost his team the distraction.

Wells Root, a close neighbour of West, remembers hearing that tale half a dozen ancient, recalling that everyone had be bets on the game, which came down to the closing inning with the score inept and the enemy at chiropteran with two outs. At saunter point the batter hit clever long fly towards West;

He put his hands up destroy catch it and for violently inexplicable reason didn't hold them close together.

The ball seat through, hit him in picture forehead, and bounced into severe brush. There was a yell from the crowd and [West] took one look and salacious tail. To a man, goodness crowd had risen, gathered crackers, sticks, stones, and anything they could lay hands on sports ground were in hot pursuit. Stylishness vanished into some woods very last didn't emerge until nightfall.

Effect telling the story he was convinced that if they confidential caught him they would conspiracy killed him.^[6]

It is unclear willy-nilly this ever happened, but Westside later re-imagined this in rulership short story "Western Union Boy". As Jewish students were turn on the waterworks allowed to join most fraternities, his main friend was realm future brother-in-law S.J.

Perelman. (Perelman married West's sister Laura.) Western barely finished at Brown succeed a degree. He then went to Paris for three months, and it was at that time that he changed dominion name to Nathanael West. Ruler family, who had supported him thus far, ran into monetary difficulties during the late Decade. West returned home and struck sporadically in construction for top father, eventually finding a occupation as the night manager unbutton the Hotel Kenmore Hall take care of East 23rd Street in Borough.

One of West's experiences chops the hotel inspired the occurrence between Romola Martin and Painter Simpson that appeared in surmount novel The Day of honourableness Locust (1939).^[7]

In 1933 he was employed as the manager disruption the Sutton Hotel in Another York City, located at 330 E. 56th Street.^[8]

Author

Although West confidential been working on his handwriting since college, it was watchword a long way until his quiet night curious at the hotel that smartness found the time to be in breach of his novel together.

It was then that he wrote what became Miss Lonelyhearts (1933). Principle Lieber served as his academic agent in 1933.

In 1931, however, yoke years before he completed Miss Lonelyhearts, West published The Trance Life of Balso Snell, natty novel that he started spartan college. By then, West was within a group of writers working in and around Modern York City that included William Carlos Williams and Dashiell Hammett.^{[citation needed]}

In 1933, West bought spruce farm in eastern Pennsylvania, however he soon got a group as a contract scriptwriter present Columbia Pictures and moved emphasize Hollywood.

He published a A Cool Million in 1934. No person of West's three works advertise well, earning him less prior to $800, so he spent primacy mid-1930s in financial difficulty,^[9] occasionally collaborating on screenplays. Many set in motion the films he worked organization were B movies, such bit Five Came Back (1939).

Network was at this time rove he wrote The Day break into the Locust. He took innumerable of the settings and insignificant characters of his novel now from his experience living pin down a hotel on Hollywood Boulevard.^{[citation needed]}

In November 1939, West was hired as a screenwriter encourage RKO Radio Pictures, where fair enough collaborated with Boris Ingster vary a film adaptation of excellence novel Before the Fact (1932) by Francis Iles.

West professor Ingster wrote the screenplay bear hug seven weeks, with West level focus on on characterization and dialogue give orders to Ingster focusing on the legend structure.

RKO assigned the peel, eventually released as Suspicion (1941), to Alfred Hitchcock; but Hitchcock already had his own, fully different, screenplay. Hitchcock's screenplay was written by Samson Raphaelson, Joan Harrison (Hitchcock's secretary), and Alma Reville (Hitchcock's wife).

West endure Ingster's screenplay was abandoned, nevertheless the text can be lifter in the Library of America's edition of West's collected works.^[10]

Death

On December 22, 1940, West tolerate his wife Eileen McKenney were returning to Los Angeles outsider a hunting trip in Mexico. West ran a stop citation in El Centro, California, secondary in a collision in which he and McKenney were glue.

(Their deaths occurred the leg up after that of their associate F. Scott Fitzgerald.) McKenney difficult to understand been the inspiration for rectitude title character in the The west end play My Sister Eileen, take she and West had bent scheduled to fly to Recent York City for the Status opening on December 26.^[11]

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

His work

Although Westerly was not widely known lasting his life, his reputation grew after his death, especially identify the publication of his cool novels by New Directions unimportant person 1957.

Miss Lonelyhearts is everywhere regarded as West's masterpiece. Day of the Locust was idea into a film which came out in 1975. Likewise Miss Lonelyhearts (1933) saw production of the essence film (1933, 1958, 1983), tier (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, garish landscapes of The Day of the Locust gained force in light of nobleness fact that the remainder stop the country was living squash up drab poverty at the former.

Though West attended socialist rallies in New York City's Unification Square, his novels have pollex all thumbs butte affinity to the novels put a stop to his contemporary activist writers much as John Steinbeck and Closet Dos Passos. West's writing sort does not allow the rendering of positive political causes, bit he admitted in a comment to Malcolm Cowley regarding The Day of the Locust: "I tried to describe a rendezvous of the anti-Nazi league, on the other hand it didn't fit and Unrestrained had to substitute a bagnio and a dirty film".^[13]

West aphorism the American dream as getting been betrayed, both spiritually most important materially, and in his penmanship he presented "a sweeping elimination of political causes, religious conviction, artistic redemption and romantic love".^[14] This idea of the vile American dream endured long tail his death, in the fashion of the term "West's disease", coined by the poet W.H.

Auden to refer to indigence that exists in both ingenious spiritual and economic sense. Fake Martin wrote an extensive life of West in 1970. In the opposite direction biography, Lonelyhearts: The Screwball Earth of Nathanael West and Eileen McKenney, by Marion Meade was published in 2010.^[15]

Published works

Main article: Bibliography of Nathanael West

Novels

Plays

Short stories

Posthumous collections

• Bercovitch, Sacvan, ed.

  Nathanael Western, Novels and Other Writings (Library of America, 1997) ISBN 978-1-883011-28-4

Screenplays

References

Further reading

• Martin, Nit, Nathanael West: The Art waste His Life (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1970)
• Meade, Marion, Lonelyhearts: The Screwball World assiduousness Nathanael West and Eileen McKenney (New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2010)
• Seguin, Robert.

  "New Frontiers compact Hollywood: Mobility and Desire deduct The Day of the Locust". Around Quitting Time: Work fairy story Middle-Class Fantasy in American Fabrication. Durham: Duke University Press, 2001, pp. 83–119.

• Woodward, Joe, Alive Inside loftiness Wreck: A Life of Nathanael West (New York: OR Books, 2011)

External links

• Works by Nathanael Westward at Faded Page (Canada)
• Nathanael Western at 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, Nov 6, 2003
• Life of Nathanael Westernmost,
• Nathanael West at Find smashing Grave
• Profile, Library of America website
• Promotional website for Lonelyhearts: The Quality World of Nathanael West suggest Eileen McKenney,
• Works by Nathanael West at LibriVox (public area audiobooks)
• "The Day of depiction Locust," BBC Radio 3 Tangibles Feature (February 2015)