why dave bergman is neat

Today's nugget is about Nathanael West and the publication of A Cool Million. I haven't read that one, but I have read The Day of the Locust, which I remember being very good. One thing I'd forgotten about it, though, was that it had a character named Homer Simpson.

June 19

1934 Nathanael West's A Cool Million is published

On this day, Nathanael West's novel A Cool Million, a satire of rags-to-riches morality tales, is published.

West, the son of Jewish immigrants, was born in New York in 1903. He attended Brown University, then went to Paris to write for about a year and a half, during which time he wrote his first novel, The Dream Life of Balso Snell, about disgruntled characters inside the Trojan Horse. Only 500 copies of the book were printed when it was published in 1931.

West returned to New York, where he took a job managing a hotel. He frequently gave free or cheap rooms to struggling fellow writers, including Dashiell Hammet and Erskine Caldwell. In 1933, he published his novella, Miss Lonelyhearts, about a male reporter who becomes increasingly troubled by the pitiful letters he answers in his advice column.

In the 1930s, West moved to Hollywood to write screenplays, and in 1939 he published The Day of the Locust, considered one of the best novels written about early Hollywood. West and his wife, Eileen McKenney, were killed in an automobile accident in California in 1940. Although West was not widely read during his lifetime, his popularity grew after World War II and after the publication of The Complete Works of Nathanael West in 1957.

For trivia buffs, it's interesting to note that West died on the same weekend as F. Scott Fitzgerald:

By a bizarre coincidence, Fitzgerald and West died on the same weekend in December 1940. West was killed in an automobile accident on December 22, near El Centro, California, with his wife Eileen McKenney. He was recently married, with better-paid script work coming in, and returning from a trip to Mexico. Distraught over hearing of his friend's Fitzgerald's death, he crashed his car after ignoring a stop sign. Eileen McKenney become the subject of a book, My Sister Eileen (1938), written by Ruth McKenney, her sister.

And since The Day of the Locust is about Hollywood, today's tidbit about entertainment history is relevant as well:

June 19

1905 First nickelodeon opens

On this day in 1905, Pittsburgh showman Harry Davis opens the world's first nickelodeon, showing a silent film called The Great Train Robbery. The storefront theater boasted 96 seats and charged only 5 cents. Nickelodeons soon spread across the country, typically featuring live vaudeville acts as well as short films. By 1907, some two million Americans had visited a nickelodeon, and the storefront theaters remained the main outlet for films until they were replaced around 1910 by large modern theaters.

Inventors in Europe and the United States, including Thomas Edison, had been developing movie cameras since the late 1880s. Early films could only be viewed as peep shows, but by the late 1890s movies could be projected on a screen. Audiences were beginning to attend public demonstrations, and several movie "factories" (as the earliest production studios were called) were formed. In 1896, the Edison Company inaugurated the era of commercial movies, showing a collection of moving images as a minor act in a vaudeville show that also included live performers, among whom were a Russian clown, an "eccentric dancer," and a "gymnastic comedian." The film, shown at Koster and Bial's Music Hall in New York City, featured images of dancers, ocean waves, and gondolas.

Short films, usually less than a minute long, became a regular part of vaudeville shows at the turn of the century as "chasers" to clear out the audience after a show. A vaudeville performers' strike in 1901, however, left theaters scrambling for acts, and movies became the main event. In the earliest years, vaudeville theater owners had to purchase films from factories via mail order, rather than renting them, which made it expensive to change shows frequently. Starting in 1902, Henry Miles of San Francisco began renting films to theaters, forming the basis of today's distribution system. The first theater devoted solely to films, "The Electric Theater" in Los Angeles, opened in 1902. Housed in a tent, the theater's first screening included a short called "New York in a Blizzard." Admission cost about 10 cents for a one-hour show. Nickelodeons developed soon after, offering both movies and live acts.