Early Days
Nathanael West was born Nathan Weinstein to a well-to-do Russian Jewish family on October 17, 1903. An indifferent student, he used another Nathan Weinstein’s transcript to bluff his way into Brown University. West remained as indifferent at college to formal education, but he was quite passionate about reading—and writing.
Following graduation, West’s family experienced financial trouble and he was forced to take a job at a Manhattan hotel as the night manager. The long quiet nights behind the front desk allowed West to focus more seriously on his writing and he soon completed his first novel, The Dream Life of Balso Snell, under the pseudonym Nathanael West.
Miss Lonelyhearts
The Dream Life of Balso Snell was followed in 1933 by one of West’s best-known works entitled Miss Lonelyhearts. Miss Lonelyhearts tells the tale of a reporter assigned the task of answering his newspaper’s advice letters, and how in being confronted with what he perceives as a hopeless sea of humanity, the reporter soon loses his mind. Though West’s brilliantly bleak novel was not a commercial success, it received strong critical acclaim and would influence numerous writers in the years to come.
West received a Hollywood option to make Miss Lonelyhearts into a film and while the end product had little to do with the original book, West was invited to California to act as a creative consultant. He began writing movie scripts as well, and his experiences within and observations of the underside of Tinseltown would form West’s other major novel, The Day of The Locust.
The Day of The Locust
The Day of The Locust involves a young man named Tod Hackett, lured to Hollywood to design sets and costumes after showing great promise as a Yale art student. Tod lives in the San Bernadino Arms, a Hollywood apartment hotel full of odd types—most connected to the movie business. Not quite the 1930s on-screen dreamworld that most Americans believed in, Tod’s universe involves dwarfs, heartless females, con artists, cockfights, and an apocalyptically bizarre backdrop.
One of the major characters of The Day of The Locust is named Homer Simpson, just like the famous cartoon father of the long-running animated series The Simpsons. Cartoon Homer was named in honor of West’s hapless and not very bright Homer, who is described in The Day of The Locust as having a smooth bland face and enormous hands, and who is constantly being taken advantage of by unscrupulous individuals.
Legacy
The career of Nathanael West was sadly cut short by an auto accident in 1940. He was killed while driving with his wife, Eileen McKenney, who would also become famous as the subject of the play and later film My Sister Eileen. Before his death, West had befriended F. Scott Fitzgerald in Hollywood. Ironically, Fitzgerald died of a heart attack the day before West’s fatal crash, and while both men were down on their luck at the time in terms of literary success, their works would ultimately be regarded as 20th century American classics.
Miss Lonelyhearts has been made into several film versions, most notably Lonelyhearts starring Montgomery Clift and a 1983 PBS version starring Eric Roberts. The Day of The Locust was adapted into a 1975 film starring Donald Sutherland, Karen Black, William Atherton, and a cast of many great character actors.
Sources
Nathanael West: Novels and Other Writings -- The Library of America (1997)
Matt Groening’s Portland -- The Portland Tribune, July 19, 2002
