A Cool Million and The Dream Life of Balso Snell

Nathanael West was only thirty-seven when he was killed in an automobile accident in 1940. But he achieved his brilliant satiric vision early on, and his descriptions of the "grotesque" aspects of the American scene rival those of Poe, Faulkner, and Flannery O’Connor. A Cool Million, written in 1934 and subtitled "The Dismantling of Lemuel Pitkin," is a satiric Horatio Alger story set in the middle of the Depression and written in a bracing, mock-heroic style. The Dream Life of Balso Snell (1931), West's first work, was described by one critic as "a fantasy about some rather scatological adventures of the hero in the innards of the Trojan horse."

Praise

"West's devotion to exaggerated normality led him naturally to humor, satire, and the grotesque . . . and though he didn't have much hope that humanity could transcend the bleakness of the world, he sympathized with the longing to do so."—Virginia Heffernan, The Boston Phoenix Literary Supplement

 

"The work of Nathanael West, savagely, comically, tragically original, has come into its own. A new public [has] discovered in the writings of West a brilliant reflection of its own sense of chaos and helplessness in a world running more to madness than to reason."—Budd Schulberg

About the Author(s)

Nathanael West

Nathanael West (1903-1940), né Nathan Weinstein, was born in New York City in 1903 and, after a literary pilgrimage to Paris, worked as a hotel manager, a journalist, and a screenwriter while writing his four novels. He was also the author of Miss Lonelyhearts and The Day of the Locust.