[1] He is remembered for two darkly satirical novels: Miss Lonelyhearts (1933) and The Day of the Locust (1939), set respectively in the newspaper and Hollywood film industries.

Nathanael West was born Nathan Weinstein in New York City, the first child of Ashkenazi Jewish parents Max (Morduch) Weinstein (1878–1932) and Anuta (Anna, née Wallenstein, 1878–1935),[2] from Kovno, Russia (present-day Kaunas, Lithuania), who maintained an upper middle class household in a Jewish neighborhood on the Upper West Side.

Wells Root, a close friend of West, remembers hearing this tale half a dozen times, recalling that everyone had placed bets on the game, which came down to the final inning with the score tied and the enemy at bat with two outs.

At that point the batter hit a long fly towards West; He put his hands up to catch it and for some inexplicable reason didn't hold them close together.

West returned home and worked sporadically in construction for his father, eventually finding a job as the night manager of the Hotel Kenmore Hall on East 23rd Street in Manhattan.

One of West's experiences at the hotel inspired the incident between Romola Martin and Homer Simpson that appeared in his novel The Day of the Locust (1939).

In 1931, however, two years before he completed Miss Lonelyhearts, West published The Dream Life of Balso Snell, a novel that he started in college.

[citation needed] In 1933, West bought a farm in eastern Pennsylvania, but he soon got a job as a contract scriptwriter for Columbia Pictures and moved to Hollywood.

[citation needed] In November 1939, West was hired as a screenwriter by RKO Radio Pictures, where he collaborated with Boris Ingster on a film adaptation of the novel Before the Fact (1932) by Francis Iles.

[12] The obscene, garish landscapes of The Day of the Locust gained force in light of the fact that the remainder of the country was living in drab poverty at the time.

West's writing style does not allow the portrayal of positive political causes, as he admitted in a letter to Malcolm Cowley regarding The Day of the Locust: "I tried to describe a meeting of the anti-Nazi league, but it didn't fit and I had to substitute a whorehouse and a dirty film".

[13] West saw the American dream as having been betrayed, both spiritually and materially, and in his writing he presented "a sweeping rejection of political causes, religious faith, artistic redemption and romantic love".