The Last Tycoon

By F. Scott Fitzgerald

The Love of The Last Tycoon is an unfinished novel by F. Scott Fitzgerald, compiled and published posthumously, in 1941. The Last Tycoon It is the story of the young Hollywood mogul Monroe Stahr, who was inspired by the life of boy-genius Irving Thalberg, and is an exposé of the studio system in its heyday. The Love of the Last Tycoon is now available for the first time in paperback.

Cecilia Brady, the daughter of a great motion-picture producer, reminisces about events that began five years earlier when she was an undergraduate at Bennington College, starting with a flight home to Hollywood on a plane whose other passengers included Wylie White, a script writer down on his luck, Manny Schwartz, once an influential producer, and Monroe Stahr, another producer and partner of Cecilia's father, Pat Brady. Cecilia is attracted to Stahr, and he turns to her at the very time that he has a falling out with her father. Each of the partners conceives the idea of murdering the other.

On the way to New York to establish an alibi, Stahr repents and decides to revoke his orders that will result in Brady's death, but his plane crashes before he can carry out his new plan and Cecilia loses both her father and the man she loves. Even in its incomplete form, The Love of The Last Tycoon: A Western has achieved a reputation as the best Hollywood novel. When F. Scott Fitzgerald died in 1940 he had written seventeen of thirty projected episodes. In 1941 the "unfinished novel" was published in a text for general readers by Edmund Wilson under the title The Last Tycoon.

Fitzgerald wrote the novel in a blend of first person and third-person omniscient narrative. While the story is ostensibly told by Cecelia, many scenes are narrated in which she is not present. Occasionally a scene will be presented twice, once through Cecelia and once through a third party.

"The Love of the Last Tycoon carries the authority of a great writer working very close to the top of his form. Only scholars will need to consult the 200 pages of extensive critical apparatus included in this edition. But anyone who admires Fitzgerald will want to take another look at the 129 pages of Tycoon text, now that they have at last been printed as he would have wanted them to be." Scott Donaldson, Chicago Tribune

• Language: English
• Publisher: F. Scott Fitzgerald
• Release date: May 14, 2015
• ISBN: 9786050379440

F. Scott Fitzgerald

F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896–1940) is regarded as one of the greatest American authors of the 20th century. His short stories and novels are set in the American ‘Jazz Age’ of the Roaring Twenties and include This Side of Paradise, The Beautiful and Damned, Tender Is the Night, The Great Gatsby, The Last Tycoon, and Tales of the Jazz Age.