"I seem to have no market whatsoever."

Another installment in "How Did That Famous Writer Get Famous?"

Nathanael West is one of my favorite writers, smart, funny, dark, weaving in social commentary. But, as Belt senior editor Mike Jauchen pointed out to me recently, he had a hell of a time selling books.

Mike sent me this wonderful if a tad twee article by Gerald Howard from 1990 about West’s disastrous publication history. West’s first novel, The Dream Life of Balso Snell, was published in 1931 by a small press, Contact Editions. It would be the final novel the press put out, as it went under soon after. West promised his publisher he would buy 150 copies of the 500 copy print run. It’s not clear how many of those 350 offered to the public the public paid for.

But things looked better as his second novel, Miss Lonelyhearts, was entering its pre-publication buzz phase in 1933. He was under contract with then hot, hot, hot Liveright, known for making literary stars (the FSG of today, perhaps). He had run the blurb table, with pull quotes from Dashiell Hammett, Edmund Wilson, and Willi…