I’d read somewhere that Nathanael West had written at least parts of his two devastating short novels, Miss Lonleyhearts and The Day of the Locust, while working the graveyeard shift at Manhattan hotels in the 1920s. From a 1970 Time article about the author called, “A Great Despiser”:

“Early in 1927, West found himself working as night manager in a seedy little Manhattan hotel on 23rd Street called Kenmore Hall; later, he moved uptown as manager of the shabby-genteel Sutton Club Hotel.

In disaster, it would seem, West found his will to write. In the hotels, he found his subject. He saw them as zoos of failure, terminal wards filled with ‘dismantled innocents’ who had lost the battle for survival in a machine civilization. With the skinned eyes of poverty, he saw that he too might someday lose the battle and wind up on the other side of the desk. Horrified, fascinated, wrung with love, he watched his tenants like a man watching himself die in a mirror. He chatted with them endlessly: he steamed open their letters and read their secrets; and through long, lonely nights in hotel offices, he braided their stories into books.”

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The original Homer Simpson on screen, 1975: