Nathanael West

Born Nathan Weinstein in New York to a prosperous Jewish building-contractor family ruined by the Depression, West talked his way into Brown University on a forged transcript and graduated with a reputation for elegant idleness rather than scholarship. He supported himself for years managing residential hotels in Manhattan, work that gave him both free lodging and a close view of the desperate letter-writers and drifters who populate Miss Lonelyhearts.

Neither that book nor The Day of the Locust, his later novel of Hollywood's fringes, sold in his lifetime; he made his living instead grinding out B-picture screenplays in Los Angeles. He married Eileen McKenney, later the subject of the memoir and play My Sister Eileen, in 1940.

Months afterward, driving back from a hunting trip, he ran a stop sign in California and died in the crash, the same day as his friend F. Scott Fitzgerald's funeral, which he had been rushing to reach.