Biography Essay

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...