Nathanael West

李潭潭
英师0902班
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Nathanael West
Nathanael West (born Nathan von Wallenstein Weinstein, October 17, 1903 –December 22,
1940) was a US author, screenwriter and satirist.
Background
The WWI: was a major war centred in Europe that began on 28 July 1914 and lasted until 11 November 1918. It involved all the world's great powers,[5] which were assembled in two opposing alliances
The Great Depression: The Great Depression was a severe worldwide economic depression in the
decade preceding World War II. The timing of the Great Depression varied across nations, but in
most countries it started in about 1929 and lasted until the late 1930s or early 1940s. It was the longest, most widespread, and deepest depression of the 20th century.
Life
West was born in 1903 in New York City, New York to Max and Anna (Wallenstein) Weinstein.
His Jewish family was financially supported by his father, a construction contractor, and spiritually supported by his mother, with her traditional Jewish influence. West showed no ambition as a young man. While attending Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island West
did not take his studies seriously. He would draw cartoons and write short surrealistic stories.
During his time at Brown, West became a friend of S.J. Perelman, who later married West's
sister. In 1926, two years after graduating with a PhD, he changed his name from Nathan Weinstein to Nathanael West. He spent a few years in Paris where he wrote his first novel, The
Dream Life of Balso Snell.
When West returned home he managed two small hotels, The Kenmore Hall (1927) and the
Sutton Club Hotel (1930-1933). During this time, West would provide free board to many interesting aspiring writers. In the early thirties West worked as a journalist. His experiences as
a hotel manager and journalist gave him the inspiration and material for his second novel, Miss Lonelyhearts (1933).
In 1935, West moved to Hollywood and lived in a cheap, small hotel called the Pa-Va-Sed to
earn his living as a scriptwriter. Prior to finding work in the movie industry, West mingled with
the outcasts of Hollywood observing and recording their lifestyles. The foundation of The Day
of the Locust is based directly on West's collection of observations. After F. Scott Fitzgerald's
death, West was incredibly distraught and on December 22, 1940 he crashed his car near El Centro, California killing both he and his wife, Eileen McKenney.
Works
Novels
The Dream Life of Balso Snell (1931)
Miss Lonelyhearts (1933)
A Cool Million (1934)
The Day of the Locust (1939)
Plays
Even Stephen (1934, with S. J. Perelman)
Good Hunting (1938, with Joseph Schrank)
Short stories
"Western Union Boy"
"The Imposter"
Posthumous collections
Bercovitch, Sacvan, ed. Nathanael West, Novels and Other Writings (Library of America, 1997) ISBN 978-1-883011-28-4
Screenplays
Ticket to Paradise (1936)
Follow Your Heart (1936)
The President's Mystery (1936)
Rhythm in the Clouds (1937)
It Could Happen to You (1937)
Born to Be Wild (1938)
Five Came Back (1939)
I Stole a Million (1939)
Stranger on the Third Floor (1940)
The Spirit of Culver (1940)
Men Against the Sky (1940)
Let's Make Music (1940)
Before the Fact (1940) (unproduced)
Literal view
In common with many of his literary contemporaries who graduated from college in the mid-twenties, West tended to turn his back on American traditions of realism and to find his inspiration and models in such older French writers of fiction as Gustave Flaubert. he did work on his first book, The Dream Life of Balso Snell (1931), during the time he was in Paris. This short Surrealist novella concerns the adventures of a young skeptic as he wanders about in the bowels of the Trojan Horse--symbolic for West of the Western tradition. There he meets and satirizes a series of self-styled artists representing the major writers of the twentieth centuryWest's second novel, Miss Lonelyhearts, is much less satirical than his first. The story of a newspaperman who writes a lovelorn column, it brilliantly fuses the tragic and comic spirits in what West was calling American "super-realism." In his third novel, A Cool Million, West returned to burlesque comedy, but with an underlying concern with the deceptions engendered by the American Horatio Alger myth of success
Literal style
He thought he wrote “moral satires”, but there are signs of visible immorality and spiritual decay there (as W.H.Auden sees it). Reading West, one gets the impression that he delights enormously in scandalizing his readers. His subjects often involve violence of a brutalizing kind, his narratives are presented in a surrealists manner, and his characters are grotesque and dehumanized. His bleak and absurd vision comes through well in his works.
Place in literal history
He was little known when alive, but he has received good posthumous critical attention and has been regarded as one of the best writers to come out the 1930s and the first important postwar novelist. He is seen as a predecessor to the American novelists of the absurd in the 1940s. "These are brilliant books. West had an unnerving ability to scrape the shine from American life. He was a specialist in grotesques: the vicious dwarf Abe Kusich and the awkward, moony Homer Simpson (yes, you read it right) of Locust, or the cripple Doyle in Lonelyhearts, a man both pitiable and horrifying. West comes out of the "Bartleby the Scrivener" Melville tradition via Franz Kafka. One could call him the father of noir, but he's better than that. "Somehow or other I
seem to have slipped in between the 'schools," he wrote Fitzgerald in 1939. All great writers do; they make their own schools. West was one of the real masters."
—Men's Journal, August 1997
Notes:
常耀信美国文学简史南开大学出版社
维基百科
The library of America
Dictionary of Literary Biography on Nathanael West。