Fitzgerald The Love Of The Last Tycoon

This critical edition of The Love of The Last Tycoon utilises Fitzgerald's manuscript drafts, revised typescipts, and working notes.

F. Scott Fitzgerald’s poignant final work is now available in a beautifully designed collector’s edition. Fitzgerald’s final novel portrays the glittering excess of 1930s Hollywood. This edition, authorized by the Fizgerald estate, is a careful restoration of the author’s phrases, words, and images that were excised from the 1940 publication, giving new luster to Fitzgerald’s last work. A tragic story of the young Hollywood mogul Monroe Stahr, a character who was inspired by the life of movie producer Irving Thalberg, The Last Tycoon is a sharply observed and bittersweet exposé of the film industry in its heyday.

1930s. The Golden Age of Hollywood. F. Scott Fitzgerald's masterpiece about the movie industry. The tragedy of a man obsessed. Monroe Stahr (loosely based on legendary producer Irving Thalberg) is in a fight with Pat Brady (loosely based on movie mogul Louis B. Mayer) over artistic control of his movies. The "Boy Wonder" is only 36 and the most celebrated producer in Hollywood, but already the corporate men are ready to throw him over if he doesn't turn a profit. In a world where money is God, art is seldom discussed. When Stahr decides to make his masterpiece, the "Shakespeare Project," as a tribute to his dead wife, knowing full well it will lose money, Brady and the Money Men try to bring him down. They stand a good chance. Stahr has a bad heart from a childhood illness. His doctor tells him if he doesn't slow down, he'll be "dead in six months." But Stahr is a man obsessed—with movies, with illusion, with memories of his dead wife, with a mysterious, enigmatic woman (Kathleen Moore) whom he met on the back lot after an earthquake nearly destroyed his studio. It's been years since he's cared about another woman. He pursues her, like his precious "Project," without regard to consequences. All around him are people who love and want to protect him—especially Cecelia Brady (Pat Brady's daughter), who takes us on a journey of love into the literal and metaphorical heart of a great man. Permission for adaptation courtesy of the Fitzgerald Estate.

A “rich, sometimes heartbreaking” (Dennis Lehane) novel of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s last years in Hollywood, from the acclaimed author of Emily, Alone and Henry, Himself In 1937, F. Scott Fitzgerald was a troubled, uncertain man whose literary success was long over. In poor health, with his wife consigned to a mental asylum and his finances in ruins, he struggled to make a new start as a screenwriter in Hollywood. By December 1940, he would be dead of a heart attack. Those last three years of Fitzgerald’s life, often obscured by the legend of his earlier Jazz Age glamour, are the focus of Stewart O’Nan’s gorgeously and gracefully written novel. With flashbacks to key moments from Fitzgerald’s past, the story follows him as he arrives on the MGM lot, falls in love with brassy gossip columnist Sheilah Graham, begins work on The Last Tycoon, and tries to maintain a semblance of family life with the absent Zelda and daughter, Scottie. Fitzgerald’s orbit of literary fame and the Golden Age of Hollywood is brought vividly to life through the novel’s romantic cast of characters, from Dorothy Parker and Ernest Hemingway to Humphrey Bogart. A sympathetic and deeply personal portrait of a flawed man who never gave up in the end, even as his every wish and hope seemed thwarted, West of Sunset confirms O’Nan as “possibly our best working novelist” (Salon).

The Love of the Last Tycoon was originally published in 1941 as The Last Tycoon. The novel was inspired by the life of film producer Irving Thalberg, on whom its rotagonist Monroe Stahr was based. The story follows Stahr's rise to power in Hollywood, and his conflicts with rival Pat Brady, a fictionalised version of Louis B. Mayer.

The last tycoon centers on the life of fictional film executive Monroe Stahr, circa Hollywood in the 1930s. Stahr is modeled loosely on the life of film executive Irving Thalberg.

"Known not only for his brilliant novels but also for short stories chronicling the Jazz Age, such as 'Bernice bobs her hair' and 'The diamond as big as the Ritz, ' F. Scott Fitzgerald continued to write stories his entire life, some of which were never published--until now. Many of the stories in I'd die for you were submitted to major magazines and accepted for publication during Fitzgerald's lifetime but were never printed. A few were written as movie scenarios and sent to studios or producers, but not filmed. Others are stories that could not be sold because their subject matter or style departed from what editors expected of Fitzgerald in the 1930s. They come from various sources, from library archive to private collections, including those of Fitzgerald's family"--Jacket flap.

Fitzgerald's last novel, published posthumously in 1941, was edited by Edmund Wilson, who attempted to polish the work to make it appear less like a work in progress. This version of the acclaimed Cambridge Critical text draws on the manuscript and Fitzgerald's own working drafts, notes, revisions, and corrections.