Nathanael West (born Nathan Weinstein; October 17, 1903 – December 22, 1940) was an American writer and screenwriter. 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 prosperous Ashkenazi Jewish parents Max (Morduch) Weinstein (1878–1932), a construction contractor, and Anuta (Anna, née Wallenstein, 1878–1935), from Kovno, Russia (present-day Kaunas, Lithuania), who lived in a Jewish neighborhood on the Upper West Side. West displayed little ambition in academics, dropping out of high school and only gaining admission into Tufts College by forging his high school transcript.

After being expelled from Tufts, West got into Brown University by appropriating the transcript of a fellow Tufts student, his cousin, Nathan Weinstein. Although West did little schoolwork at Brown, he read extensively. He ignored the realist fiction of his American contemporaries in favor of French surrealists and British and Irish poets of the 1890s, in particular Oscar Wilde. West's interests emphasized unusual literary style as well as unusual content. He became interested in Christianity and mysticism as experienced or expressed through literature and art.

West's friends at Camp Paradox, a summer camp in Adirondack, New York, nicknamed him Pep in ironic reference to his somnolent disposition. West acknowledged and made fun of his lack of physical prowess in recounting the story of a baseball game where he cost his team the game. 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. The ball tore through, hit him in the forehead, and bounced into some brush. There was a roar from the crowd and [West] took one look and turned tail. To a man, the crowd had risen, gathered bats, sticks, stones, and anything they could lay hands on and were in hot pursuit. He vanished into some woods and didn't emerge until nightfall. In telling the story he was convinced that if they had caught him they would have killed him.

It is unclear whether this ever happened, but West later re-imagined this in his short story "Western Union Boy". As Jewish students were not allowed to join most fraternities, his main friend was his future brother-in-law S.J. Perelman. (Perelman married West's sister Laura.) West barely finished at Brown with a degree. He then went to Paris for three months, and it was at this time that he changed his name to Nathanael West. His family, who had supported him thus far, ran into financial difficulties during the late 1920s. 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 1933 he was employed as the manager of the Sutton Hotel in New York City, located at 330 E. 56th Street.

Although West had been working on his writing since college, it was not until his quiet night job at the hotel that he found the time to put his novel together. It was then that he wrote what became Miss Lonelyhearts (1933). Maxim Lieber served as his literary agent in 1933. 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. By then, West was within a group of writers working in and around New York City that included William Carlos Williams and Dashiell Hammett.^{[citation needed]}