A Cool Million
Encyclopedia
A Cool Million: The Dismantling of Lemuel Pitkin is Nathanael West
Nathanael West
Nathanael West was a US author, screenwriter and satirist.- Early life :...

's third novel, published in 1934. It is a brutal satire of Horatio Alger's novels and their eternal optimism.

Plot summary

A Cool Million, as its subtitle suggests, presents “the dismantling of Lemuel Pitkin,” piece by piece. As a satire of the Horatio Alger myth
Horatio Alger myth
The "Horatio Alger myth" is a criticism of the rags to riches message in books by Horatio Alger, Jr. . Alger wrote over 100 books for young working class males, beginning with Ragged Dick, which was published in 1867. His books have been described as rags to riches stories...

 of success, the novel is evocative of Voltaire
Voltaire
François-Marie Arouet , better known by the pen name Voltaire , was a French Enlightenment writer, historian and philosopher famous for his wit and for his advocacy of civil liberties, including freedom of religion, free trade and separation of church and state...

’s Candide
Candide
Candide, ou l'Optimisme is a French satire first published in 1759 by Voltaire, a philosopher of the Age of Enlightenment. The novella has been widely translated, with English versions titled Candide: or, All for the Best ; Candide: or, The Optimist ; and Candide: or, Optimism...

, which satirized the philosophical optimism
Optimism
The Oxford English Dictionary defines optimism as having "hopefulness and confidence about the future or successful outcome of something; a tendency to take a favourable or hopeful view." The word is originally derived from the Latin optimum, meaning "best." Being optimistic, in the typical sense...

 of Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz and Alexander Pope
Alexander Pope
Alexander Pope was an 18th-century English poet, best known for his satirical verse and for his translation of Homer. He is the third-most frequently quoted writer in The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations, after Shakespeare and Tennyson...

. Pitkin is a typical ‘Schlemiel’, stumbling from one situation to the next; he gets robbed, cheated, unjustly arrested, frequently beaten and exploited. In a parallel plot Betty Prail, Pitkin's love interest, is raped, abused, and sold into prostitution. Over the course of the novel Pitkin manages to lose an eye, his teeth, his thumb, his scalp and his leg, but nevertheless retains his optimism and gullibility to the inevitably bitter end.

Pitkin’s troubles, however, don't end with his death. Even after his passing he is exploited as a martyr by the ‘National Revolutionary Party’, a political organization led by Shagpoke Whipple, a manipulative former American president. Pitkin's birthday becomes a national holiday and American youths march down the streets singing songs in his honor. Whipple speaks out against aliens and calling for a rejection of “sophistication, Marxism
Marxism
Marxism is an economic and sociopolitical worldview and method of socioeconomic inquiry that centers upon a materialist interpretation of history, a dialectical view of social change, and an analysis and critique of the development of capitalism. Marxism was pioneered in the early to mid 19th...

 and International Capitalism
Capitalism
Capitalism is an economic system that became dominant in the Western world following the demise of feudalism. There is no consensus on the precise definition nor on how the term should be used as a historical category...

.” The novel ends with a series of roaring "hails" from the crowd.

Literary significance & criticism

Pitkin's pathetic inability to conform to society’s standards, or to the ‘American’ way of life, is the main cause of his repeated failures. Nevertheless, there is something admirable in Pitkin’s naïve persistence, as West wrote in a letter to S. J. Perelman
S. J. Perelman
Sidney Joseph Perelman, almost always known as S. J. Perelman , was an American humorist, author, and screenwriter. He is best known for his humorous short pieces written over many years for The New Yorker...

:
Suppose he had the Horatio Alger slant and was a guy who was trying to get one foot on the ladder of success and they were always moving the ladder on him, but they couldn’t touch the dream.


West not only parodies Alger by mimicking his prose style, he also lifted several passages directly from a number of different Alger novels. The problem that arises from these passages lacking an ironic wink is of uncertainty. In A Cool Million, West presents Italian slavers, Chinese pimps, brutal Irish cops, and greedy Jewish lawyers. The vicious stereotypes presented prompted critics to question: at what point does a joke about racism cease to be funny and remain merely racist?

Though most of the early criticism dismissed the novel as too direct of a parody to have any real literary merit, it is seen by some as an early example of postmodernism
Postmodernism
Postmodernism is a philosophical movement evolved in reaction to modernism, the tendency in contemporary culture to accept only objective truth and to be inherently suspicious towards a global cultural narrative or meta-narrative. Postmodernist thought is an intentional departure from the...

. Harold Bloom
Harold Bloom
Harold Bloom is an American writer and literary critic, and is Sterling Professor of Humanities at Yale University. He is known for his defense of 19th-century Romantic poets, his unique and controversial theories of poetic influence, and his prodigious literary output, particularly for a literary...

 includes A Cool Million in his list of canonical works of the period he names the Chaotic Age (1900–present) in The Western Canon . Bloom also deems the rhetoric used by Shagpoke Whipple as prophetic of such presidents as Ronald Reagan
Ronald Reagan
Ronald Wilson Reagan was the 40th President of the United States , the 33rd Governor of California and, prior to that, a radio, film and television actor....

 .

Publication history

West began writing A Cool Million in the fall of 1933. A handwritten first draft was completed in November. Though Harcourt, Brace
Harcourt Trade Publishers
Harcourt was a United States publishing firm with a long history of publishing fiction and nonfiction for children and adults. The company was based in San Diego, California, with an Editorial / Sales / Marketing / Rights offices in New York City and Orlando, Florida.In 2007, the U.S...

 rejected the novel, West continued to work on it until it was finally accepted by Covici-Friede in March 1934 The novel was published in New York
New York
New York is a state in the Northeastern region of the United States. It is the nation's third most populous state. New York is bordered by New Jersey and Pennsylvania to the south, and by Connecticut, Massachusetts and Vermont to the east...

 in an edition of 3,000 copies to mixed reviews and poor sales; it was not reprinted in West's lifetime. The novel later appeared in several reprints starting from 1940, following West's renewed fame, and was collected in a single volume edition of the complete novels, as well as in the Library of America
Library of America
The Library of America is a nonprofit publisher of classic American literature.- Overview and history :Founded in 1979 with seed money from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Ford Foundation, the LoA has published over 200 volumes by a wide range of authors from Mark Twain to Philip...

 edition of West's collected works.

A Cool Million - a screen story

In September 1940 West wrote an original screen story in collaboration with Boris Ingster. They used A Cool Million as their title, though the story had nothing to do with the novel, hoping that a studio would pay more for a story allegedly based on a published book. West was certain that no one would actually read the book to check whether the screen story had any relation to the novel. On September 24, 1940 Columbia Pictures
Columbia Pictures
Columbia Pictures Industries, Inc. is an American film production and distribution company. Columbia Pictures now forms part of the Columbia TriStar Motion Picture Group, owned by Sony Pictures Entertainment, a subsidiary of the Japanese conglomerate Sony. It is one of the leading film companies...

 bought the story for $10,000 and assigned it to screenwriter Sidney Buchman
Sidney Buchman
Sidney Robert Buchman was a screenwriter and producer who worked on 38 films from the late 1920s to the early 1970s. He is also sometimes credited as Sydney Buchman.-Career:...

. However, the studio soon abandoned the project and A Cool Million was never filmed. The text of the screen story appears in the Library of America's edition of West's work.
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