"This is the first biography of the enigmatic man who wrote Miss Lonelyhearts and The Day of the Locust, novels that Edmund Wilson has called 'more finished and complete as works of art than almost anything else produced by his generation.' Jay Martin set out to retrace the curve of Nathanael West's life, from New York City, where West was born in 1903 and lived for many years; to the campuses of Tufts College and Brown University; to Bucks County, where A Cool Million was written; to Hollywood, where West worked on screenplays during his last five years; to El Centro, California, where, at the age of thirty-seven, he was killed in an auto accident the day after his fried F. Scott Fitzgerald died. Nathanael West was, as his biographer shows, a writer who responded to the American life of his time with prophetic originality. Mr. Martin analyzes with particular eloquence West's involvement with some phenomena of the twenties and thirties -- the Dadaist and Surrealist movements, the Depression, radical politics, the flourishing movie industry. West's many friends in Hollywood and literary New York also play important parts in the drama of his life. But the book's principal aim is always to illuminate the little-known character of West himself, his self-transformations, his ambitions, his failures, and -- especially in the influential novels -- his enduring successes. West's papers, the property of his sister Laura and his brother-in-law and friend, S.J. Perelman, provided an invaluable starting point for this authoritative biography. Numbering about 700 items, these papers include letters, notebooks and scrapbooks, unpublished plays and short stories, poems, film scenarios, and plans for novels."--From the dust-jacket flaps.