Nathanael West's 1934 novel, A Cool Million satirizes American ideology by targeting rags to riches novels popularized by Horatio Alger through the story of Lemuel Pitkin. Lemuel is a poor farm boy with a widowed mother who goes off to seek his fortune and save his mother's house from foreclosure. His optimism and honesty cost him his eye, thumb, leg, teeth, spirit and eventually his life.
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,...
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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 indi...
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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, Goo...
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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 succee...
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Biography EssayAll 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 wor...
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Nathanael West
Nathanael West