Nathanael West

Novelist

• Born: October 17, 1903
• Birthplace: New York, New York
• Died: December 22, 1940
• Place of death: El Centro, California

Novelist West had a profound influence on the development of postwar American fiction and especially on the black humorists of the 1960’s.

Early Life

Nathanael West (nah-THAN-yuhl wehst) was born in were chosen to Max Weinstein and Anna Wallenstein, Jewish immigrants from Kovno, Lithuania. Nathanael West’s father was a successful building contractor, and West grew up in comfort. Although he did not finish high school, he was admitted into Tufts College on a forged transcript in 1921. When he was asked to leave after a few months, for academic reasons, West made up a new transcript to gain admission to Brown University, and he entered fully into the Ivy League life, graduating in 1924. West’s father sponsored a trip to Europe after college, including a long visit to Paris, and West returned to New York in 1927 to become a night manager at several residential hotels, first at Kenmore Hall and later at the Suffolk Club Hotel, where he allowed friends—including writers Edmund Wilson, Erskine Caldwell, Dashiell Hammet, and Lillian Hellman—to live rent free.

West’s parents wanted their son to be assimilated into American culture, and they succeeded. West received little or no Jewish religious education, never had a Bar Mitzvah, and acknowledged no Jewish heritage in his work. Nevertheless, his novels reflect his Jewish background, with their focus on outsiders and their bittersweet humor characteristic of American Jewish life. West’s fiction is built upon the tension between the dreams that drew his parents to America and his recognition of the failure of those dreams.

Life’s Work

In 1930, West finished his first novel, The Dream Life of Balso Snell (1931), on which he had been working for several years, and it was published the following year to little notice. Carefully written and structured, the novel is a surrealist fantasy with multiple satirical targets, including religion, art, and literature.

Miss Lonelyhearts, a bitter satire of a newspaperman posing as a female advice columnist who gets caught up in the meaningless suffering of his readers, was published in 1933; although it received good reviews, it failed when its publisher went bankrupt. Considered by some critics as West’s strongest effort, the novel attacks the myths of Christian love. Miss Lonelyhearts’s editor, the cynical Shrike, taunts all of the advice columnist’s attempts at compassion, and Miss Lonelyhearts is killed in the end by the husband of one of the letter writers he is trying to help.

West made a brief trip to Hollywood in 1933 to try his hand at screenwriting, but returned to New York and published A Cool Million (1934), a political satire of the Horatio Alger myth that received few positive reviews and sold poorly. (West earned about thirteen hundred dollars combined for his four novels.) His father had given West, as a youngster, Horatio Alger novels to read, and West turned the myth on its head. In his novel—subtitled The Dismantling of Lemuel Pitkin—the hero sets out to make his fortune and instead loses everything, including his limbs and organs, one by one. A major Hollywood studio bought the rights to A Cool Million, however, and West returned to Hollywood for a second try at screenwriting. He worked on a number of scripts, but the lasting value of his Hollywood stay was in the characters and settings he encountered and poured a few years later intoThe Day of the Locust (1939), a satire on the Hollywood dream that critics have called the best novel written about the film industry.

In 1940,West married Eileen McKenney, the subject of her sister Ruth’s book, My Sister Eileen (1938), but the couple was killed eight months later in an auto accident returning from a hunting trip in Mexico. West was thirty-seven.

Significance

Like his contemporary, William Faulkner, West wrote experimental novels that ran counter to the realistic and naturalistic literary modes and moods of the Great Depression, and both writers would be discovered fully after World War II. Faulkner was out of print in 1944, but he won win the Nobel Prize six years later, and West was rediscovered after his novels were published in one volume as The Complete Works of Nathanael West in 1957, and his influence on American literature after that was profound. Writers such as Flannery O’Connor and Joseph Heller showed the impact of West’s surreal and satirical fiction, but even more telling was his influence on what came to be known as the “black humor” that flourished in the 1960’s, in the novels of Ken Kesey, Terry Southern, Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., and others. (Stanley Kubrick’s film Dr. Strangelove (1964) is often cited as the classic example of 1960’s black humor.) The postwar ascendancy of Jewish fiction in the United States—in the writing of Saul Bellow, Norman Mailer, J. D. Salinger, Bernard Malamud, and Philip Roth, among many others—included comic writers such as Heller, Lenny Bruce, Bruce Jay Friedman, and Woody Allen, who drew on that dark, bitter strain of American humor critics found earlier developed in West’s novels. West is acknowledged as one of the forefathers of the Jewish fiction that emerged in the United States after World War II, and particularly of its black humor form.

Bibliography

Barnard, Rita. The Great Depression and the Culture of Abundance: Kenneth Fearing, Nathanael West, and Mass Culture in the 1930’s. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995. A fresh reading of Fearing’s poetry and West’s fiction in the context of the 1930’s, and especially the tension between literature and the growth of mass culture in the decade.

Bloom, Harold, ed. Nathanael West. New York: Chelsea House, 1986. This volume in the Modern Critical Views series includes a representative selection of the best criticism of West’s novels, by Stanley Edgar Hyman, Daniel Aaron, and R. W. B. Lewis, among others.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗, ed. Nathanael West’s Miss Lonelyhearts. New York: Chelsea House, 1987. This collection brings together ten of the most incisive discussions of West’s novel. In his introduction, Bloom explains why he considers Miss Lonelyhearts West’s best novel and a prime example of Jewish Gnosticism in American fiction.

Bombaci, Nancy. Freaks in Late Modernist American Culture: Nathanael West, Djuna Barnes, Tod Browning, and Carson McCullers. New York: Peter Lang, 2006. A new study of the racial and ethnic outsiders (particularly Jews) found in the work of these four writers.

Martin, Jay. Nathanael West: The Art of His Life. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 1970. Martin’s study is still the definitive biography of West, and it includes penetrating analysis of the novels.

Siegel, Ben, ed. Critical Essays on Nathanael West. New York: G. K. Hall, 1994. Part of the Critical Essays on American Literature series, this volume contains thirty reviews of the novels, plus seventeen longer essays, including pieces by Leslie Fiedler, Victor Comerchero, David M. Fine, and others.

Veitch, Jonathan. American Superrealism: Nathanael West and the Politics of Representation. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1997. A valuable study that places West in the context of a lively American avant-garde tradition and recognizes his links to the earlier artistic movements of Dada and surrealism,