1940 It has been argued that West (author of Miss Lonelyhearts and A Cool Million) is one of the very greatest writers of his time. Few would dispute that he was one of the worst drivers.
The Ancient Mariner of 20th-century literature, West’s career had been dogged by bad luck. His first published novel, The Dream Life of Balso Snell (1931), was still-born when the publisher handling it went down in the post-1929 Crash. Mysteriously, although review copies of Miss Lonelyhearts went out in 1933, and the novel was glowingly reviewed, no copies were delivered to bookshops. A Cool Million (1936) was deemed too depressing by readers in the depths of the Depression. West, who wrote fiction with great difficulty, reckoned in the year before his death that he had made less than $1,000 from his three major novels.
He had been obliged, like other writers of the time, to indenture himself to Hollywood. He hated the work, but could do it easily. And in the two years leading up to his death he was, at last, on Easy Street, earning up to $500 a week writing scripts for RKO. He married and bought himself a handsome Ford station wagon.
On the way back from a hunting trip in Mexicali with his wife, Eileen, his liver-coloured pointer bitch, Julie, and a trunk full of dead duck, West was driving along the highway to El Centro. Normally his wife refused to drive with him, regarding him as ‘murderous’ behind the wheel. Many of his friends were similarly disinclined to be Nate’s passenger. He had a bad habit of turning his head to whomever he was talking to – and he talked animatedly.
Blithely shooting a boulevard turn (at which he should have stopped) onto Route 80, West ploughed into an oncoming Pontiac truck driven (entirely legally) by a farmer. The Wests were killed (the fate of Julie is unrecorded). West was 37 years old.
It was a season of literary death. Over the winter months of 1940–41 Sherwood Anderson, Virginia Woolf, and James Joyce died. It is sometimes surmised that West was preoccupied on the fateful afternoon of 22 December by news that his friend, and idol, Scott Fitzgerald had died on the evening of the 21st – news that he had received by telephone.