The Collected Works of Nathanael West

About the Book

With an Introduction and Notes by Henry Claridge, Senior Lecturer, School of English, University of Kent at Canterbury.

The four novels gathered here constitute the complete longer works of one the most brilliant and original American writers. West’s vision of American modernity is terrifyingly comical and diagnoses the tawdriness and meretriciousness of much of American popular culture. His greatest work, Miss Lonelyhearts, which begins this collection, is unique in modern literature. It describes New York in the early years of the Great Depression through the point of view of an ‘agony aunt’ who corresponds with his suffering readers in the guise of Miss Lonelyhearts: ‘(Are you in trouble? – Do you need advice?)’. A Cool Million is, as its subtitle suggests, the ‘dismantling’ of a myth, here a caustic satire of the ‘rags to riches’ story. West’s final novel, The Day of the Locust, is a comic, yet apocalyptic account of the fantasies of 1930s Hollywood. This volume concludes with West’s parodic and surreal first venture into fiction, The Dream Life of Balso Snell. Henry Claridge’s introduction to this new edition of West’s fictional writings contextualises his work in the United States of the Great Depression, in his evocation of 1930s Hollywood (where he worked as a writer of screenplays), and in the larger context of his Eastern European Jewish background, and, particularly, his reading of Dostoyesvky. The text comes with extensive annotations, a note on the textual history of West’s writings, and a guide to further reading for both the student and the general reader.

About the Author

Nathanael West

Nathanael West was born Nathan Weinstein in New York City on October 17, 1903, the first child of Max and Anna Weinstein. Both his parents were German-speaking Lithuanian Jews, who married in 1902, shortly after their arrival in America. West's father was a hard-working and successful building contractor until the Depression curtailed the construction industry. His parents were cultivated people and both of them came from close-knit, large families. West attended grade school and high school in upper Manhattan and was always a poor student, preferring to spend his time reading books. He often skipped his classes and did not graduate from high school, but on the basis of a forged transcript, he was admitted to Tufts University in Massachusetts. There, he also neglected his studies and was finally forced to withdraw. West soon gained admittance, however, to Brown University on the basis of the transcript of another Nathan Weinstein. At Brown, West studied what he wished, participated in college dramatics and publications, and made a reputation for himself as a satiric cartoonist. He immersed himself in modern literature and art and read widely in what were then considered to be decadent books, as well as many other books about esoteric lore and religion and magic. He was rejected for fraternity membership because he was Jewish, which was one of the reasons why he eventually changed his name legally.

In his younger years, West became notorious among his friends for his laziness, which earned him the lifelong nickname of "Pep" (the opposite of his usual behavior). At Brown, West began many friendships with the young writers and artists on campus; then after graduating from Brown in 1924 with a Ph.D., he worked for his father until he sailed to Paris late in 1926, presumably to write. Although West allowed his friends to believe that he was abroad for two or three years, he was really there for less than three months. He returned to New York early in 1927 and secured a job as a desk clerk in a second-rate residential hotel, a type of job which he held sporadically during the early 1930s. At the Kenmore Hotel and, later, at the Sutton Hotel, West saw the seamier side of American life and enjoyed putting up his down-on-their-luck friends without charge. During these years, West wrote and rewrote his first novel, The Dream Life of Balso Snell (1931), which received little attention and sold poorly. This short novel is a surrealistic fantasy about a young writer's sojourn up and into the intestinal tract of the Trojan Horse, where he encounters various specimens of deranged, deformed, and unsavory humanity. West satirizes optimistic social formulas, religious clichés, and artistic pretensions in an elaborate, epigrammatic style. As in his later work, he shows distaste for the human body and expresses doubts about the dignity of sexuality.

During this period, West's range of friends increased and his artistic dedication intensified. He was friends with William Carlos Williams, Dashiell Hammett, James T. Farrell, Quentin Reynolds, and Josephine Herbst, among others. His closest friend was the humorist S. J. Perelman, who married West's favorite sister, Laura. West interrupted his menial hotel work with stays in the country, where he labored arduously on his second novel, Miss Lonelyhearts. This book, his masterpiece, on which West worked at the rate of about one hundred words a day, was published in 1933 and was recognized by friends and reviewers alike as a work of original genius. But its publisher went bankrupt shortly before the book's publication, and the book never received wide distribution.