A Cool Million: The Dismantling of Lemuel Pitkin is Nathanael West's savage burlesque of the American success myth, recasting the Horatio Alger narrative as a grotesque Depression-era picaresque. Its innocent hero, Lemuel Pitkin, journeys through a nation of fraud, violence, and ideological manipulation, losing pieces of himself as the promises of enterprise and uplift collapse into bodily and political mutilation. Written in a brisk, deadpan, cartoonlike style, the novel belongs to the modernist tradition of black comedy and social satire, exposing the brutal absurdities beneath patriotic optimism. West, born Nathan Weinstein in New York in 1903, was a Jewish-American writer acutely attentive to mass culture, economic despair, and the theatricality of public life. His work as a hotel manager and later Hollywood screenwriter sharpened his eye for failed dreamers, cheap fantasies, and systems that exploit longing. Composed amid the Great Depression and rising fascist energies, this novel reflects his distrust of sentimental redemption and national mythmaking. Readers interested in American modernism, political satire, or the dark underside of the American Dream will find A Cool Million indispensable. It is brief, merciless, and startlingly contemporary, a comic nightmare that rewards attention to its irony, exaggeration, and prophetic critique of demagoguery.