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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 poetry and essays. The dominant theme in West's novels is degeneration of religion, sex, and art in a decaying society. Unlike many other social novelists, West, however, blamed the individuals, not their institutions, for society's decline. 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 of life and a sure road to the destruction of humankind.
West's friend Isadore Kapstein said that "to be an artist served West in three ways: 1) in fiction he could discharge all the resentment he could not discharge in fact; 2) in fiction he could rise above the world of fact and manipulate it to his will; 3) as an artist in fiction he could prove to the world that had rejected him that it was wrong and that he deserved to be accepted by it." Kapstein concluded that West's writing "was not an end in itself, but a means to an end; the achievement of acceptance, the dream life of Nathanael West come true."
Much of West's feeling of rejection stemmed from his being a Jew, and like other second-generation Jews in America, he changed his name--from Nathan Weinstein to Nathanael West--partly at least in an attempt to gain social acceptance.
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