Nathanael West
| Nathanael West | |
|---|---|
| Born | Nathan Weinstein October 17, 1903 New York City, New York, U.S. |
| Died | December 22, 1940 (aged 37) El Centro, California, U.S. |
| Resting place | Mount Zion Cemetery, Queens, New York, U.S. |
| Occupation | Novelist, Screenwriter |
| Language | English |
| Nationality | American |
| Ethnicity | Jewish |
| Citizenship | American |
| Alma mater | Brown University |
| Notable works | Miss Lonelyhearts, The Day of the Locust |
| Spouse | Eileen McKenney (1940) |
Nathanael West (born Nathan Weinstein; October 17, 1903 – December 22, 1940) was an American author, screenwriter and satirist.
Nathanael West was born Nathan Weinstein in New York City, the first child of Ashkenazi Jewish parents, Anuta (Anna) (née Wallenstein, 1878–1935) and Max (Morduch) Weinstein (1878–1932), from Kovno, Russia (present-day Kaunas, Lithuania), who maintained an upper middle class household in a Jewish neighborhood on the Upper West Side. West displayed little ambition in academics, dropping out of high school and only gaining admission into Tufts College by forging his high school transcript.
After being expelled from Tufts, West got into Brown University by appropriating the transcript of a fellow Tufts student, his cousin, Nathan Weinstein. Although West did little schoolwork at Brown, he read extensively. He ignored the realist fiction of his American contemporaries in favor of French surrealists and British and Irish poets of the 1890s, in particular Oscar Wilde. West's interests focused on unusual literary style as well as unusual content. He became interested in Christianity and mysticism, as experienced or expressed through literature and art.
West's classmates at Brown ironically nicknamed him "Pep" after a school trip where after only a few minutes of walking he quickly ran out of breath. West himself acknowledged and made fun of his lack of physical prowess in recounting the story of a baseball game where he cost his team the game. Wells Root, a close friend of West, remembers hearing this tale half a dozen times, recalling that everyone had placed bets on the game, which came down to the final inning with the score tied and the enemy at bat with two outs. At that point the batter hit a long fly towards West;
He put his hands up to catch it and for some inexplicable reason didn’t hold them close together. The ball tore through, hit him in the forehead, and bounced into some brush. There was a roar from the crowd and [West] took one look and turned tail. To a man, the crowd had risen, gathered bats, sticks, stones, and anything they could lay hands on and were in hot pursuit. He vanished into some woods and didn’t emerge until nightfall. In telling the story he was convinced that if they had caught him they would have killed him.
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