All around him he saw hypocrisy, lack of communication, the failure of love to heal. He saw the garish, bizarre, erotic, and grotesque replacing the standard criteria for defining a work of art. The result, he believed, is chaos, a natural concomitant...

Nathanael West wrote four novels, The Dream Life of Balso Snell (1931), Miss Lonelyhearts (1933), A Cool Million: The Dismantling of Lemuel Pitkin (1934), and The Day of the Locust (1939), a play, Good Hunting , with Joseph Schrank, and a smattering of...

Early in the twentieth century it was quite common for young Jewish men, especially those whose parents had come from Poland and Russia, to change their names. In an effort to make it easier to succeed in America, the "goldineh medina," that is, the...

The writer who was to become known as Nathanael West was born Nathan Weinstein in New York City; he was the first son of Russian-Jewish immigrants. His individuality early exhibited itself in his indifference toward school; his interest in the arts,...

The work of the American novelist Nathanael West (1903-1940) is strikingly original. It is characterized by its use of mythic themes in contemporary settings, terrifying symbolism, profound pessimism, and grisly humor. Nathanael West was born Nathan...