Novelist Nathanael West, was born in New York to a family of Jewish immigrants on this day in 1903. He attended Brown University, then went to Paris to write for a year and a half, where he wrote his first novel, The Dream Life of Balso Snell (1931), about disgruntled characters inside the Trojan Horse. Only 500 copies of the book were printed.
When West returned to New York, he took a job managing a hotel, where he frequently gave free rooms to struggling writer friends, including Dashiell Hammet and Erskine Caldwell. In 1933, he published his novella, Miss Lonelyhearts, about a male reporter who becomes increasingly troubled by the pitiful letters he answers in his advice column.
In the 1930s, West moved to Hollywood to write screenplays, and in 1939 he published The Day of the Locust, considered one of the best novels about early Hollywood. West and his wife, Eileen McKenney, were killed in an automobile accident in California in 1940. Although West was not widely read during his lifetime, his popularity grew after World War II and after the publication in 1957 of The Complete Works of Nathanael West.
