The Day of the Locust | Author Biography

Nathanael West was born Nathan Weinstein in New York City on October 17, 1903. (He legally changed his name in 1926.) West was the son of Jewish immigrants Max Weinstein, a prosperous building contractor, and Anna Wallenstein Weinstein. Mr. Weinstein wanted his son to go into the family business and gave Nathan copies of the Horatio Alger books, a series of novels in which honest young men do well for themselves in business. West, whose friends gave him the nickname Pep because he was so lazy, was uninterested in the typical trappings of upper middle-class success and dropped out of high school. He lied his way into Tufts University, which expelled him for poor grades, and then got himself admitted to Brown University by using someone else's transcripts. West graduated from Brown in 1924, where he was better known for his sense of humor and interest in parties than any scholarly abilities.

After finishing college, West spent two years in Paris, courtesy of his father. He was called back to the United States in 1927, as the family's contracting business was experiencing the first economic shudders that would become more widespread in 1929. West's family found him a series of jobs managing residential hotels so that he could earn a living. Through these jobs, West was able to provide many impoverished writers with rent-free places to stay in New York City and to meet many writers who would soon become famous, including Dashiell Hammett, Erskine Caldwell Lillian Hellman and S. J. Perelman, West's brother-in-law. West found the desperate lives of some of his tenants fascinating, and he was known to steam open and read their letters. During this period, he finished his first book, The Dream Life of Balso Snell, and published it to almost no critical or commercial notice in 1931.

West published his second book, Miss Lonelyhearts, in 1933 to great admiration from the critics and others within his literary circle, but it received very little attention from the book-buying public. Concerned about his apparent inability to earn money from his books, West moved to California in 1933 to take a job as a screenwriter for Columbia Pictures. This job only lasted about a year, so West moved back to New York City to write his third book, A Cool Million: The Dismantling of Lemuel Pitkin. In 1935, a major movie studio bought the rights to the novel, so West went to California to try his hand at screenwriting again. Upon his return, West lived in cheap hotels much like the ones he had lived in and managed in New York City. West enjoyed learning about the lives of the people he met at these hotels, and soon his circle of friends included prostitutes, petty criminals, and stuntmen. West's struggle for screen-writing work lasted about a year, during which he was supported by money from his brother-in-law, Perelman, before he found a job with a minor studio that produced low-budget films.

Through his newfound income from screen-writing, West was able to afford a more comfortable lifestyle, one that allowed him to focus more artistically on his novels and plays. He published The Day of the Locust in 1939. Like Miss Lonelyhearts, it received some acclaim but little notice from the general public. Over the course of his lifetime, West earned only about $1,300 from his novels. He died in an automobile accident with his wife of only nine months, Eileen McKenney, on December 22, 1940, when he drove through a stop sign near El Centro, California.