18 Facts About Nathanael West

Nathanael West is remembered for two darkly satirical novels: Miss Lonelyhearts and The Day of the Locust, set respectively in the newspaper and Hollywood film industries.

Nathanael West was born Nathan Weinstein in New York City, the first child of Ashkenazi Jewish parents Max Weinstein and Anuta, from Kovno, Russia, who maintained an upper middle class household in a Jewish neighborhood on the Upper West Side.

Nathanael West ignored the realist fiction of his American contemporaries in favor of French surrealists and British and Irish poets of the 1890s, in particular Oscar Wilde.

Nathanael West's interests emphasized unusual literary style as well as unusual content.

Nathanael West became interested in Christianity and mysticism as experienced or expressed through literature and art.

Nathanael West acknowledged and made fun of his lack of physical prowess in recounting the story of a baseball game where he cost his team the game.

Wells Root, a close friend of Nathanael West, remembers hearing this tale half a dozen times, recalling that everyone had placed bets on the game, which came down to the final inning with the score tied and the enemy at bat with two outs.

Nathanael West put his hands up to catch it and for some inexplicable reason didn't hold them close together.

Nathanael West vanished into some woods and didn't emerge until nightfall.

Nathanael West then went to Paris for three months, and it was at this time that he changed his name to Nathanael West.

Nathanael West returned home and worked sporadically in construction for his father, eventually finding a job as the night manager of the Hotel Kenmore Hall on East 23rd Street in Manhattan.

In 1931 two years before he completed Miss Lonelyhearts, Nathanael West published The Dream Life of B Snell, a novel that he started in college.

In 1933, Nathanael West bought a farm in eastern Pennsylvania, but he soon got a job as a contract scriptwriter for Columbia Pictures and moved to Hollywood.

Nathanael West took many of the settings and minor characters of his novel directly from his experience living in a hotel on Hollywood Boulevard.

In November 1939, Nathanael West was hired as a screenwriter by RKO Radio Pictures, where he collaborated with Boris Ingster on a film adaptation of the novel Before the Fact by Francis Iles.

Nathanael West ran a stop sign in El Centro, California, resulting in a collision in which he and McKenney were killed.

Nathanael West was buried in Mount Zion Cemetery in Queens, New York, with his wife's ashes placed in his coffin.

Nathanael West saw the American dream as having been betrayed, both spiritually and materially, and in his writing he presented "a sweeping rejection of political causes, religious faith, artistic redemption and romantic love".