A Cool Million and The Dream Life of Balso Snell Two Novels
Nathanael WestPublished2006
Pages179
Formatpaperback
PublisherMacmillan
Synopsis
Nathanael West was only thirty-seven when he died in 1940, but his depictions of the sometimes comic, sometimes horrifying aspects of the American scene rival those of William Faulkner and Flannery O'Connor. A Cool Million, written in 1934, is a satiric Horatio Alger story set in the midst of the Depression. The Dream Life of Balso Snell (1931) was described by one critic as "a fantasy about some rather scatological adventures of the hero in the innards of the Trojan horse."
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About Nathanael West
N
Nathanael West
1903–1940
Nathan Wallenstein Weinstein was born in 1903 in New York City. He attended Brown University and from 1924 to 1931 he lived in Paris, where he wrote *The Dream Life of Balso Snell*. On his return to New York, he managed a residential hotel and was associate editor, with [William Carlos Williams](https://openlibrary.org/authors/OL219856A/William_Carlos_Williams), of the magazine *Contact*. *Miss Lonelyhearts* appeared in 1933, *A Cool Million* in 1934 and *The Day of the Locust* in 1939. He worked on film scripts in Hollywood for the last five years of his life. He and his wife were tragically killed in a car accident in 1940. *--Penguin Books* Photo *--Wikicommons*
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