Lonelyhearts: The Screwball World of Nathanael West and Eileen McKenney - Paperback

by Marion Meade (Author)

Nathanael West was a comic artist whose insight into the brutalities and absurdities of modern life proved prophetic. He is famous for two masterpieces, " Miss Lonelyhearts "and the most penetrating novel ever written about Hollywood, "The Day of the Locust." Eileen McKenney, accidental muse and literary heroine, fled Cleveland in search of romance and adventure, inspiring her sister s humorous stories, "My Sister Eileen," which led to stage, film, and television adaptations.

Back Jacket

A great marriage of scholarship and gossip. Minneapolis Star-Tribune

"Meade deftly choreographs these boldface names as they rush to and fro between Hollywood and New York, those antipodes of 1930s writers." Wall Street JournalSet in the 1930s against the bright lights of New York and the klieg lights of Hollywood, a dazzling joint biography and lively snapshot of one of our most captivating erasNathanael West was a comic artist whose insight into the absurdities of modern life proved prophetic. Eileen McKenney, accidental literary heroine, was the inspiration for her sister Ruth s humorous bestseller, My Sister Eileen, which led to stage, film, and television adaptations, including Leonard Bernstein s 1953 musical Wonderful Town. Until their tragic deaths in 1940, West and McKenney were intimate with many of the notables of the era, and in this dual biography, they provide a one-of-a-kind lens into a world that continues to capture our imaginations. With trenchant insight and erudite charm, acclaimed biographer Marion Meade paints a dynamic tableau of interwar America and of two of its most charming actors."Meade s dual biography smartly plays one life against the other, maximizing the gradual tension that comes from watching two fireballs happily, and then disastrously, collide." Free Times (Columbia, SC)MARION MEADE is the author of Dorothy Parker: What Fresh Hell Is This? and Bobbed Hair and Bathtub Gin: Writers Running Wild in the Twenties. She has also written biographies of Woody Allen, Buster Keaton, Eleanor of Aquitaine, Madame Blavatsky, and Victoria Woodhull, as well as two novels about medieval France."