Nathanael West, originally named Nathan Weinstein (born October 17, 1903, New York, N.Y., USA - died December 22, 1940, El Centro, California), was an American writer primarily known for his satirical novels of the 1930s. Of middle-class Jewish immigrant descent, he attended high school in New York City and graduated from Brown University in 1924. During a 15-month stay in Paris, he completed his first novel, "The Dream Life of Balso Snell," which recounted the story of a strange assortment of grotesque characters inside the Trojan horse. It was published in 1931 in an edition of only 500 copies. After returning to New York, West supported himself by working as a hotel manager. At the time, he secured free or low-cost rooms for struggling fellow writers such as Dashiell Hammett, James T. Farrell, and Erskine Caldwell. His second novel, "Miss Lonelyhearts" (1933), tells the story of a columnist whose manipulative attempts to console his correspondents end in ironic defeat. In "A Cool Million" (1934), West effectively mocks the popularized American success dream by Horatio Alger, portraying a hero who spirals from bad to worse while supposedly doing the right thing. In his later years, West worked as a screenwriter in Hollywood. "The Day of the Locust" (1939) is, in the opinion of many, the best novel ever written about Hollywood. The work dramatizes the false world and the people on the fringes of the film industry. West died in an automobile accident with his wife, Eileen McKenney, the heroine of "My Sister Eileen" (1938), a popular book, play, and film by Ruth McKenney. Not widely read during his lifetime, West attracted attention after World War II, initially in France, where a successful translation of "Miss Lonelyhearts" appeared in 1946. The publication in 1957 of "The Complete Works of Nathanael West" sparked renewed interest in West's work in the United States and other countries.