The Last Tycoon
by F. Scott Fitzgerald
Summary
Cecilia Brady, the movie struck daughter of a Hollywood producer, narrates the rise of Monroe Stahr, a young studio executive modeled closely on Irving Thalberg, who runs his studio by instinct and long hours rather than by committee. Still grieving his dead wife, an actress, Stahr becomes fixated on Kathleen Moore, a young Irish woman he glimpses during a studio backlot flood who resembles her uncannily. Their brief affair unsettles him just as Pat Brady, Cecilia's father and Stahr's nominal partner, moves to undercut Stahr's authority at the studio. Fitzgerald's manuscript, complete through roughly two thirds of its planned length, breaks off after a drunken Stahr picks a fight with a communist organizer he has invited to dinner. His surviving notes and outline indicate that Brady was to try blackmail and then a hired killer, that Stahr would arrange to have Brady killed in return and then regret it, and that Stahr was to die in a plane crash before he could call off what he had set in motion, leaving both men dead and Cecilia, who has loved Stahr from a distance the whole novel, with neither of them.
Fitzgerald left behind six chapters, along with notes, an outline, and false starts that show him still revising the shape of the plot as he wrote. It reads, even unfinished, with a control and clarity closer to The Great Gatsby than to his weaker later work, Cecilia's voice carrying real wit even when the surrounding scenes stop mid page. A reader has to hold two things at once, an actual novel and the shadow of the one Fitzgerald never got to finish, and the second is impossible to read around.
Fitzgerald died of a heart attack in December 1940 at forty four, notes for the unfinished chapters spread across his apartment. His friend and Princeton classmate Edmund Wilson edited what existed into a publishable book, adding an appendix of Fitzgerald's own outline notes, and Charles Scribner's Sons published it in 1941. A later, more scholarly edition, retitled The Love of the Last Tycoon after Fitzgerald's own working title and edited by Matthew Bruccoli in 1993, restored some of Wilson's silent smoothing of the prose.
Historical Context & Significance
No prize weighed an unfinished novel assembled by an editor from a dead man's notes, and none is recorded as having considered this one. The 1942 Pulitzer, the year the fragment was eligible, went to Ellen Glasgow's In This Our Life, a completed novel of a Virginia family largely forgotten today next to the fragment Fitzgerald left behind.
Reviewers in 1941 were struck by how much better the book was than its unfinished state should have allowed. J. Donald Adams wrote in The New York Times that one would be blind indeed not to see that it would have been Fitzgerald's best novel, and his own editor Maxwell Perkins said flatly that the first chapter alone is good enough to stand by itself, adding that it breaks a man's heart to see what this book could have been. Hollywood adapted it twice, a 1976 film directed by Elia Kazan with a screenplay by Harold Pinter and Robert De Niro as Stahr, and a 2016 Amazon television series, each one finishing, in its own way, a story Fitzgerald never lived to.