Nathanael West

Nathanael West was born Nathan Weinstein in 1903 in New York City to Lithuanian Jewish immigrant parents. He attended Brown University, managed residential hotels in Manhattan where he befriended writers including Dashiell Hammett and S.J. Perelman (who became his brother-in-law), and moved to Hollywood in the mid-1930s to work as a screenwriter. His experiences in the film industry provided the material for The Day of the Locust, his fourth and final novel. He published four novels in his lifetime, none of which achieved significant commercial success. This author hub collects 1 work in the Canon Compass ranking, led by The Day of the Locust.