Nathanael West

Nathan Weinstein, who took the name Nathanael West in 1926, was born in New York in 1903 into a Jewish family of Lithuanian origin. He entered university thanks to a forged transcript, stayed in Paris in 1926, then became a night manager of hotels in Manhattan, where he put up writer friends for free. He went to write B-movie screenplays in Hollywood, where his novels hardly sold. He died in California in December 1940, aged thirty-seven, in a car accident in which his wife perished with him, the day after the death of Francis Scott Fitzgerald.

In the catalogue 1

• NovelThe Day of the LocustNathanael West · 1939Literature