The Last Tycoon is Fitzgerald’s brilliant unfinished novel. It might have been his greatest and most mature piece of fiction, and even unfinished, it is a fascinating read. His friend from Princeton, the critic Edmund Wilson, edited the published version and wrote the introduction.
The Last Tycoon focuses on the last days of Monroe Stahr, a brilliant studio executive who understands how to make a popular blockbuster but also how to make quality movies he knows will lose money. Fitzgerald based the character on Irving Thalberg, the boy-genius film producer. The novel offers an insider’s view of Hollywood in the 1930s.
The story is told through the eyes of Cecilia Brady, the daughter of Stahr’s business partner and adversary, an honest modern girl with a satirical eye. At its core, Stahr falls in love with the mysterious Kathleen, who immediately reminds him of his dead wife. That haunting quality echoes Fitzgerald’s own sense of lost love and the disintegration of his wife, Zelda. As in much of Fitzgerald’s work, Zelda becomes the subject and emotional backstory of his writing.
The romanticism of creating a perfect world in Tender Is the Night and The Great Gatsby is replaced by a darker, starker vision. There is a plot with a Hollywood ending combined with Fitzgerald’s artistry. We’ll never know what this book could have been if Fitzgerald had lived another six months. What we have is a work that might have surpassed The Great Gatsby.
Read the 1941 New York Times review of The Last Tycoon.
See The Last Tycoon by F. Scott Fitzgerald on Audiobooks, Amazon/Audible, and Bookstores who are not Amazon.
You might like So We Read On: How The Great Gatsby Came to Be and Why It Endures by Maureen Corrigan as well as the novella “Three A.M.” a look back at Scott and Zelda’s fall from grace.
Articles include affiliate links, which may provide a small compensation to Noovella.
