In 1940, when an automobile accident prematurely claimed Nathanael West's life, he was a relatively obscure writer, the author of only four short novels. West's reputation has grown considerably since then and he is now considered one of the 20th century's major authors. This superb volume, edited by Sacvan Bercovitch, compiles all of West's novels and a great number of other documents, including stories, plays, and letters. Novels and Other Writings is the most complete West now available in a single volume. Film buffs will be particularly fascinated by Miss Lonelyhearts, which served as the basis for two intriguing movies and The Day of the Locust, West's final novel, which many consider to be the most withering attack on Hollywood ever written. Among the papers included in this collection are a never-filmed screenplay, Before the Fact, and a screen treatment of West's novel A Cool Million.


From Library Journal
When he was just 37, West?and his wife?died in a car wreck while rushing home from a hunting trip to attend the wake of fellow novelist and screenwriter Scott Fitzgerald, who died unexpectedly the previous day. The two friends were waked in adjoining rooms at the same Los Angeles funeral home. This volume combines West's novels?The Dream Life of Balso Snell, Miss Lonelyhearts, A Cool Million, and The Day of the Locusts, considered by many to be the best novel about Hollywood ever written?the play Good Hunting, plus a screenplay, some shorter fictional pieces, and a selection of his letters. If your collection is shamefully lacking in West, this splendid volume gives you virtually his entire career. One of the finest collections of the year.Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc.


From Kirkus Reviews
``Forget the epic, the masterwork,'' Nathanael West said. ``In America. . . families have no history. Leave slow growth to the book reviewers, you only have time to explode.'' In retrospect, it seems to have made sense for West to have been in such a hurry. In quick succession he hurled four incendiary novels at the literary establishment, beginning in 1931 with The Dream Life of Balso Snell and continuing with Miss Lonelyhearts, A Cool Million, and his masterpiece, The Day of the Locust. He died soon after finishing the book, in a traffic accident, at the age of 37. West seemed a unique figure in the 1930s, writing novels that mixed ferocious satire of the American establishment and the hustling, hypocritical spirit of capitalism with bawdy humor and a grim, unblinking view of the manner in which irrationality overwhelms logic and the best intentions. This Library of America volume, reprinting the novels along with screenplays, short stories, essays, and some wonderfully pungent letters, demonstrates that not much has changed: West is still a satirist with few peers and no betters, and a writer of bleak, haunting power. -- Copyright ©1997, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.


Midwest Book Review
When Nathanael West died in a California highway accident in 1940 at the age of thirty-seven, his originality and brilliance were little know outside an intensely admiring circle of fellow writers. Nathanael West: Novels And Other Writings is the the only complete literary portrait of West, a key figure in the first generation of American writers to divide their time between Hollywood and New York. With the four novels (for which he is famous), this authoritative new collection also gathers stories, poetry, essays and plays, film scripts and treatments, and letters. Many of these pieces are published here for the first time.


From the Publisher
The Library of America is an award-winning, nonprofit program dedicated to publishing America's best and most significant writing in handsome, enduring volumes, featuring authoritative texts. Hailed as "the most important book-publishing project is the nation's history" (Newsweek), this acclaimed series is restoring America's literary heritage in "the finest-looking, longest-lasting edition ever made" (New Republic).

FROM OUR EDITORS

The Hotel Nathanael West

The Library of America's "historic endeavor" is to preserve America's "most significant writing in durable and authoritative editions. Oh no! you think. Not another volume of Henry James! But the Library of America is anything but predictable. Indeed it does publish James. And Melville. And even Abraham Lincoln. But last year it also printed a gorgeous two-volume set of Raymond Chandler. This summer it issued classic noir in Crime Novels: American Noir of the 1930s and 40s. Now it's presenting the complete Nathanael West, America's first cult writer. Consider him a cross between Camus and Dorothy Parker -- as well as my patron saint.

This delicious volume contains not only West's four published novels (including Miss Lonelyhearts and The Day of the Locust) but also a selection of his letters (to Edmund Wilson, Malcolm Cowley, and others), as well as "Other Writings" and "Unpublished Writings and Fragments." That last selection includes West's outline for the "racket" novel he intended to start writing in 1940 after he returned to Los Angeles from a quail hunt in Mexico. He never wrote the book. Just north of the border, West's station wagon ran a stop sign and got creamed by a Pontiac. The writer died, along with his bride of eight months; the only survivors of the wreck were West's dog, Julie, and the man's quirky prose.

Although West's books were odd ducks -- F. Scott Fitzgerald once lamented that West was "doomed to the underworld of literature" -- they were never forgotten. Year after year, each built a steady readership, until three decades after his death, high school students (like me) were required to study West's work.

Now that he's free of the "underworld," it can be told that West wasn't his real name. He was born Nathan Wallenstein-Weinstein in New York City in 1903. As a kid, his nickname was "Pep." When he turned 23, he changed his name because, as he later joked to his friend, William Carlos Williams: "Horace Greeley said, 'Go West, young man.' So I did." As for Nathanael, he chose that spelling of Nathaniel because the Nat-with-an-a was an "evil" character in the Bible. (Pep was wrong; Nathanael was actually Saint Bartholomew.)

Why West wanted to honor evil is another story, but his new name first turned up on the passport he used to go to Paris in 1926 to hang out with the French surrealists. He returned to New York later that year to begin his first novel, The Dream Life of Balso Snell (published in 1931), a work the founder of surrealism, André Breton, would label, "humour noir."

West worked on the book from 1927 to 1929. He had scored a job as the night manager of a hotel on 23rd Street and offered free rooms to writer pals such as Dashiell Hammett. Dash finished his Sam Spade novel The Maltese Falcon there while West banged out his Balso Snell story. Not that Snell is a private dick like Spade. Instead, he's a Trojan poet who walks into the, uh, "mystic portal" (anus) of the Trojan horse and has adventures in its belly.

In 1929 West met a woman who wrote an advice-to-the-lovelorn newspaper column that inspired his second novel, Miss Lonelyhearts ("Miss Lonelyhearts" is actually a he). When the novel was published, in 1933, critics called it "sordid." This prompted William Carlos Williams to write, "How much longer will it take, I wonder, for America to build up a cultural ice of sufficient thickness to bear a really first-rate native author?"

While that "first-rate native author" was working on Lonelyhearts, he was unofficially engaged to a fashion model. I can imagine this girl writing her own "Lonelyhearts" letter:

"Dear Miss Lonelyhearts, I am a beautiful fashion model. My fiancée just deceived me by spending the night with that dog-faced writer, Lillian Hellman. Are all first-rate native authors this deceitful?"

Probably. Pep befriended many fellow "native" writers in both Manhattan and Hollywood (where he worked off and on writing screenplays). His buddies included Dorothy Parker, John O'Hara, and William Faulkner (who always referred to Pep as "Mr. West" when they hunted wild boars, because of some obscure southern hunting etiquette).

In the mid-'30s, West published his demented takeoff on Horatio Alger, A Cool Million. A few years later, in 1938, he completed The Day of the Locust, his undeniable masterpiece. With this work, West created his own genre: Hollywood Apocalypse. The novel concerns the fates of Faye (a Hollywood extra), Abe (a Hollywood dwarf), and Homer Simpson (yes, this Homer coming 60 years before you-know-who).

I used to think that I knew West's work backward and forward, but this volume contains a poem I'd never read, entitled "Burn the Cities," which I realized was the inspiration for "The Burning of Los Angeles" -- a painting that figures prominently in Locust. The volume also has letters West wrote to Locust My favorite letter is one West wrote to F. Scott Fitzgerald in 1939, after Fitzgerald praised his work: "Somehow or other I seem to have slipped in between all the 'schools,'" West says. "My books meet no needs except my own....Your [praise] made me feel that they weren't completely private and maybe not even entirely jokes."

In that spirit, I'd like to share something private with you (a fantasy, not a joke): Surely somewhere in midtown Manhattan there stands the Hotel Nathanael West. Where writers flop for free and finish their novels. Where the elevator is manned by Miss Lonelyhearts. And the bellboys are all Eskimos (in honor of the Eskimo family in Day of the Locust). Finally, instead of Gideon's Bibles, copies of West: Novels & Other Writings are found on the bedstands. After all, both books contain lovely ribbon bookmarkers!

—David Bowman

FROM THE PUBLISHER

The library of America is dedicated to publishing America's best and most significant writing in handsome, enduring volumes, featuring authoritative texts. Hailed as the "finest-looking, longest-lasting editions ever made" (The New Republic), Library of America volumes make a fine gift for any occasion. Now, with exactly one hundred volumes to choose from, there is a perfect gift for everyone.

FROM THE CRITICS

Library Journal

When he was just 37, Westand his wifedied in a car wreck while rushing home from a hunting trip to attend the wake of fellow novelist and screenwriter Scott Fitzgerald, who died unexpectedly the previous day. The two friends were waked in adjoining rooms at the same Los Angeles funeral home. This volume combines West's novelsThe Dream Life of Balso Snell, Miss Lonelyhearts, A Cool Million, and The Day of the Locusts, considered by many to be the best novel about Hollywood ever writtenthe play Good Hunting, plus a screenplay, some shorter fictional pieces, and a selection of his letters. If your collection is shamefully lacking in West, this splendid volume gives you virtually his entire career. One of the finest collections of the year.

Kirkus Reviews

"Forget the epic, the masterwork," Nathanael West said. "In America. . . families have no history. Leave slow growth to the book reviewers, you only have time to explode." In retrospect, it seems to have made sense for West to have been in such a hurry. In quick succession he hurled four incendiary novels at the literary establishment, beginning in 1931 with The Dream Life of Balso Snell and continuing with Miss Lonelyhearts, A Cool Million, and his masterpiece, The Day of the Locust. He died soon after finishing the book, in a traffic accident, at the age of 37. West seemed a unique figure in the 1930s, writing novels that mixed ferocious satire of the American establishment and the hustling, hypocritical spirit of capitalism with bawdy humor and a grim, unblinking view of the manner in which irrationality overwhelms logic and the best intentions. This Library of America volume, reprinting the novels along with screenplays, short stories, essays, and some wonderfully pungent letters, demonstrates that not much has changed: West is still a satirist with few peers and no betters, and a writer of bleak, haunting power.