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    The Last Tycoon: An Unfinished Novel
    The Last Tycoon: An Unfinished Novel
    The Last Tycoon: An Unfinished Novel
    Ebook253 pages3 hours

    The Last Tycoon: An Unfinished Novel

    By F. Scott Fitzgerald

    3.5/5

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    *With a new introduction by bestselling and iconic novelist Haruki Murakami*

    This edition of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s final unfinished novel is now restored to the original 1941 text, with updates by Fitzgerald scholar James L. W. West III.

    When F. Scott Fitzgerald died in 1940, he left behind an unfinished draft of this poignant novel, inspired by his own experience working in Hollywood as a screenwriter. Literary critic Edmund Wilson edited Fitzgerald’s notes and material to publish this text of The Last Tycoon in 1941. Now, this edition restores Wilson’s editorial work and includes an introduction from celebrated author Haruki Murakami.

    Set in Hollywood in the 1930s, The Last Tycoon tells the tragic story of a young film producer named Monroe Stahr. Exploring themes of ambition, power, and corruption, The Last Tycoon depicts Stahr’s struggle to balance his personal life and professional goals with the challenges of running a successful movie studio. Based on the career of real-life producer Irving Thalberg, the head of MGM who was known as Hollywood’s “boy wonder”, The Last Tycoon is a sharply observed and bittersweet exposé of the glittering excess of the Hollywood film industry in its prime.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherScribner
    Release dateDec 12, 2023
    ISBN9781668065266
    The Last Tycoon: An Unfinished Novel
    Author

    F. Scott Fitzgerald

    F. Scott Fitzgerald was born in Saint Paul, Minnesota, in 1896, attended Princeton University in 1913, and published his first novel, This Side of Paradise, in 1920. That same year he married Zelda Sayre, and he quickly became a central figure in the American expatriate circle in Paris that included Gertrude Stein and Ernest Hemingway. He died of a heart attack in 1940 at the age of forty-four.

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    3.5/5

    225 ratings10 reviews

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    • 4/5
      A beautifully,, believably written book that sadly was not completed due to the author's death. The characters are fully formed and complex. The environments that scenes take place are carefully crafted to set the mood and echo the events taking place.
    • 4/5
      *Partial spoilers ahead*

      Too bad that Fitzgerald was unable to finish The Last Tycoon, since it's obvious that he was returning to the focused, tightly structured style of The Great Gatsby after the rambling disorder of Tender is the Night. The prospect of slogging through an incomplete novel may seem a bleak one to many readers, but this book contains one of Fitzgerald's finest moments. Monroe Stahr, so visibly unwell, is the author's most sympathetic protagonist (though one might not expect to find a film studio executive--or any Fitzgerald character, for that matter--sympathetic), and Stahr's encounter with Kathleen at his unfinished beach house is a tour de force of mature writing. Their excitement, their knowledge that the romance can only come to a bad end, and the blend of awkwardness and humor that characterizes their post-sex conversation are incredibly realistic. This scene is not cleverly, poetically written: it's believably written, and demonstrates Fitzgerald's true mastery.

      Contains a brief foreword by Edmund Wilson, just under 150 pages of novel text, a synopsis of how the book would have ended and a lengthy section of notes on the manuscript ("Rewrite from mood," Fitzgerald said of Chapter 1). For fans it's a must, and for anyone it's a fascinating look at the construction of a work of literary art.
    • 4/5
      I read this the way I read most Fitzgerald novels, over a weekend, in giant chunks. This one feels a little less like his work and a little more disjointed, and that is because it was compiled after he died, by editor Matthew Bruccoli.

      I have to say, as an unfinished work, Bruccoli does an incredible job of assembling the narrative. I also had issues with the narrative voice, at first. Although the main narrator was a woman, it still had a very masculine, Scott-like tone, but I grew accustomed to it.

      I don't think I am the ideal Fitzgerald reader. I'm a pretty lazy reader. I don't scrutinise every conversation for all his subtleties and mastery.

      I loved this. Scott writes some really, really beautiful passages. The scene at the drug store lunch counter? Perfection.

      I wouldn't recommend starting on this book if this is your first Fitzgerald but as always, any time I read him I'm left wondering why I waited so long to start.
    • 1/5
      he Last Tycoon is F. Scott Fitzgerald's last novel. It was unfinished and published posthumously. This edition contains the full text as finished by the author + outlines, notes and correspondence about the novel which elucidates or helps understand the novel and how Scott Fitzgerald intended to finish it.

      Scott Fitzgerald was one of the top authors of his age, the best-paid short story writer of the 1920s. He is probably best known for those stories which are the ultimate expression of the 'Roaring Twenties'. After the Great Depression of 1929, the market for magazine-published stories collapsed, and his stories written and published in the 30s reflect this depressing period, almost like a hangover from the previous decade.

      Scott Fitzgerald's novels tend to be a bit more serious. They are set in the same milieu of the jet set, often featuring loose lifestyle morals with a tendency to flippancy. The Last Tycoon is a little bit more serious.

      The novel is set in Hollywood, but its main character is not a film star. She is the daughter of a wealthy director. Thus, the novel portrays the Hollywood life from within, but not directly from its glamorous side. Focus is rather on the writers and the makers of movies, perhaps one might say the unglamorous side of the film world.

      While Hollywood movies are all about the fulfillment of Romantic love, the novel is about unrequited love: She loves him. He loves someone else. The idea is simple, yet so true.

      Besides this main theme, the novel develops some sidelines about the less glamorous side of Hollywood.

      Personally, I find the novels of Scott Fitzgerald difficult to read. The writing is obviously very good, and in many places wonderful, creating great moments, however, the overall structure is loose and sometimes it is difficult to follow what's going on. With Fitzgerald, however, it's worth the effort, and on the whole The Last Tycoon is a satisfactory read.
    • 5/5
      If only I had read this work years ago... There is much to be learnt by reading an unfinished book, especially this with the author's chapter plan, character sketches, unedited rants and revisions. I expected Fitzgerald's colleagues to have attempted to finish the novel. Instead, however, the rawness of "The Last Tycoon" provides a window into the mind of an author in full swing. Yet if it were finished I doubt it would have had the same impact. On finishing reading the book I was at once melancholy - for the author, for the characters, for the friendship/comradeship/competition between Fitzgerald and Hemingway, for the thought processes that we would like to think are far too human, too prosaic for those who have written and written well. The scholarly care for the development of the piece is amplified precisely because of the scaffolding Fitzgerald left behind at his death, much like seeing the inner workings of a precision timepiece normally hidden from view. Fitzgerald's plot does the same to Hollywood. So much so that he couldn't have planned it better, or written truer at all, had he finished the story. "The Last Tycoon" immortalises Fitzgerald as a glorious death in battle for a warrior king. Only we are much the poorer for his early demise.
    • 5/5
      It's too bad this was never finished. I think this would have been my favorite Fitzgerald book. Even incomplete, I like it better than anything else I have read. This is a simple yet complicated story about love. She loves him. He loves someone else. That someone else is set to marry anyone else but him. Classic love square. You have to feel sorry for Monroe Stahr. He is lovestruck by a woman who strongly resembles his deceased wife. As a man in the movie business he has the money and the power to woo Kathleen into a brief relationship, even despite the fact she is engaged to be married to someone else. Meanwhile, there is young Cecilia, a junior at Bennington College, just willing Stahr to look at her, to notice her. It is her voice that tells the entire story. Fitzgerald explains the first and third person narrative. What Cecilia is not witness to, she imagines. "Thus, I hope to get the verisimilitude of a first person narrative, combined with a Godlike knowledge of all events that happen to my characters" (p 164).
    • 5/5
      A great pity that it is unfinished.
    • 4/5
      I was a little skeptical to read an unfinished novel. But, I enjoyed The Great Gatsby too much to pass this up. It was clear that this novel could have been even better than Gatsby.

      I enjoyed reading the novel. The editors added a section to explain what may have happened next. I found this pointless. The story stands alone quite well and there is no need to figure out what happens next. The beauty is in the writing and story telling. It can end where it ends.
    • 4/5
      Fitzgerald's unfinished novel of Hollywood in the 1930s centres on Monroe Stahr a workaholic film producer who falls for a young girl who reminds him of his dead wife. The novel is narrated by the young daughter of the studio head who has a crush on Starr. Had he lived this could have been a novel that would have revived his fortunes. An intriguing but sad read.
    • 5/5
      Clearly his unfinished masterpiece - full of Scott's usual skill at conveying those little essences of life for which there really is no word. Also his best of all works in terms of describing a situation so vividly with so little verbiage. The notes are published at the end of this copy, showing other phrases and concepts he intended to include but had not yet integrated. His notes reveal that the plot would get somewhat more harsh, bringing in plots of murder, communism, unions, and a plane crash. The telling through both Cecilia and from the third person allows some very interesting perspective. She is a dynamic character in this story, but more because she sees her past through her now more mature (or jaded?) eyes. Her early wisdom: "It's not a slam at you when people are rude -- it's a slam at a people they've met before." Monroe Stahr has both reserve and spitfire moments. He is perfectly portrayed as the last of his kind of totalitarian, but fatherly tycoon's of that time. The overall work is very well integrated with the current history and parallels of Fitgzeral's time (and sickness, and comments about film and writing). He is especially clever for using the relationship between screenwriting and movies to make meaning within the story and about the arts themselves.

    Book preview

    The Last Tycoon - F. Scott Fitzgerald

    The Last Tycoon. by F. Scott Fitzgerald. Introduction by Haruki Murakami.

    Praise for The Last Tycoon

    "Had Fitzgerald been permitted to finish the book, I think there is no doubt that it would have added a major character and a major novel to American fiction. As it is, The Last Tycoon is a great deal more than a fragment. It shows the full powers of its author, at their height and at their best."

    —Stephen Vincent Benét, Saturday Review of Literature

    [Fitzgerald’s] unique achievement, in these beginnings of a great novel, is that here for the first time he has managed to establish that unshakable moral attitude towards the world we live in, and towards its temporary standards, that is the basic essential of any powerful work of the imagination.

    —John Dos Passos, A Note on Fitzgerald

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    The Last Tycoon: An Unfinished Novel, by F. Scott Fitzgerald. Edited by Edmund Wilson. With an Introduction by Haruki Murakami. Scribner. New York | London | Toronto | Sydney | New Delhi.

    FOREWORD

    EDMUND WILSON

    F. SCOTT FITZGERALD died suddenly of a heart attack (December 21, 1940) the day after he had written the first episode of Chapter 6 of his novel. The text which is given here is a draft made by the author after considerable rewriting; but it is by no means a finished version. In the margins of almost every one of the episodes, Fitzgerald had written comments—a few of them are included in the notes—which expressed his dissatisfaction with them or indicated his ideas about revising them. His intention was to produce a novel as concentrated and as carefully constructed as The Great Gatsby had been, and he would unquestionably have sharpened the effect of most of these scenes as we have them by cutting and by heightening of color. He had originally planned that the novel should be about 60,000 words long, but he had written at the time of his death about 70,000 words without, as will be seen from his outline, having told much more than half his story. He had calculated, when he began, on leaving himself a margin of 10,000 words for cutting; but it seems certain that the novel would have run longer than the proposed 60,000 words. The subject was here more complex than it had been in The Great Gatsby—the picture of the Hollywood studios required more space for its presentation than the background of the drinking life of Long Island; and the characters needed more room for their development.

    This draft of The Last Tycoon, then, represents that point in the artist’s work where he has assembled and organized his material and acquired a firm grasp of his theme, but has not yet brought it finally into focus. It is remarkable that, under these circumstances, the story should have already so much power and the character of Stahr emerge with so much intensity and reality. This Hollywood producer, in his misery and grandeur, is certainly the one of Fitzgerald’s central figures which he had thought out most completely and which he had most deeply come to understand. His notes on the character show how he had lived with it over a period of three years or more, filling in Stahr’s idiosyncrasies and tracing the web of his relationships with the various departments of his business. Amory Blaine and Anthony Patch were romantic projections of the author; Gatsby and Dick Diver were conceived more or less objectively, but not very profoundly explored. Monroe Stahr is really created from within at the same time that he is criticized by an intelligence that has now become sure of itself and knows how to assign him to his proper place in a larger scheme of things.

    The Last Tycoon is thus, even in its imperfect state, Fitzgerald’s most mature piece of work. It is marked off also from his other novels by the fact that it is the first to deal seriously with any profession or business. The earlier books of Fitzgerald had been preoccupied with debutantes and college boys, with the fast lives of the wild spenders of the twenties. The main activities of the people in these stories, the occasions for which they live, are big parties at which they go off like fireworks and which are likely to leave them in pieces. But the parties in The Last Tycoon are incidental and unimportant; Monroe Stahr, unlike any other of Scott Fitzgerald’s heroes, is inextricably involved with an industry of which he has been one of the creators, and its fate will be implied by his tragedy. The moving-picture business in America has here been observed at a close range, studied with a careful attention and dramatized with a sharp wit such as are not to be found in combination in any of the other novels on the subject. The Last Tycoon is far and away the best novel we have had about Hollywood, and it is the only one which takes us inside.

    It has been possible to supplement this unfinished draft with an outline of the rest of the story as Fitzgerald intended to develop it, and with passages from the author’s notes which deal, often vividly, with the characters and scenes.

    It is worth while to read The Great Gatsby in connection with The Last Tycoon because it shows the kind of thing that Fitzgerald was aiming to do in the latter. If his conception of his subject in Tender Is the Night had shifted in the course of his writing it so that the parts of that fascinating novel do not always quite hang together, he had recovered here the singleness of purpose, the sureness of craftsmanship, which appear in the earlier story. In going through the immense pile of drafts and notes that the author had made for this novel, one is confirmed and reinforced in one’s impression that Fitzgerald will be found to stand out as one of the first-rate figures in the American writing of his period. The last pages of The Great Gatsby are certainly, both from the dramatic point of view and from the point of view of prose, among the very best things in the fiction of our generation. T. S. Eliot said of the book that Fitzgerald had taken the first important step that had been made in the American novel since Henry James. And certainly The Last Tycoon, even in its unfulfilled intention, takes its place among the books that set a standard.

    INTRODUCTION

    Even though you know it will end in defeat…

    HARUKI MURAKAMI

    AT THE YOUNG age of forty-four, on December 21, 1940, in Hollywood, F. Scott Fitzgerald breathed his last. It was a quiet winter solstice day, and that afternoon he was chewing on a chocolate bar and reading an article about a football game in the Princeton Alumni Weekly. Beethoven’s Eroica Symphony was playing on his phonograph. And then suddenly, like a bolt of lightning, death came over him. The cause of death was no doubt a heart attack brought on by years of alcoholism.

    As a novelist he left behind a lengthy manuscript of a novel set in Hollywood which, sadly, was but half finished. For the literary world his death came far too early. From the steady progress he had made on the novel, if he had had at least one more year he probably would have nearly completed this ambitious work that he’d put everything he had into. And then he would have polished the writing further (adding what people dubbed the Fitzgerald touch). It was a fate beyond his control, but even so it was a tremendous loss.

    Edmund Wilson, Fitzgerald’s friend from college and a well-known literary critic, read the incomplete manuscript, recognized its literary value, and offered to use the numerous memos (outlines and plans) Fitzgerald had left behind to organize the fragmentary pages of the manuscript, create a plot line, reorder the chapters, and organize it as much as he could into something close to a completed novel. This reworked version was published by Scribners in 1941 under the title The Last Tycoon, and for over fifty years this Edmund Wilson edition was the sole version available to and read by the general public. My translation of The Last Tycoon into Japanese also uses this 1941 edition as its text.

    The Wilson edition is thorough and compelling, though a bit forced in parts, and in later years when new material was released to the public, some Fitzgerald scholars questioned his edition as a kind of remake, or severely criticized it. Matthew J. Bruccoli, in the forefront, took Wilson to task for, as he saw it, taking the memos Fitzgerald had left behind and often altering them to suit his own purposes. Bruccoli also claimed that Wilson invented the title, which of course has great significance for the work.

    It’s true that while he was writing the book, Fitzgerald’s working title was the quite simple, even bland Stahr: A Romance. And shortly before he died, he asked his companion Sheilah Graham what she thought of the title The Love of the Last Tycoon: A Western. He also apparently planned to sound out his editor at Scribners, Maxwell Perkins, about it, and tell him it was one of his top choices for a title. Fitzgerald also considered The Last of the Tycoons, too, as a possible title, but, as researchers have pointed out, he never once proposed using the title The Last Tycoon.

    Bruccoli soundly disapproved of Wilson’s altering of the title and in 1993 he published, from Cambridge University Press, the book under its original title of The Love of the Last Tycoon: A Western. Honestly speaking, though, for me, the other titles don’t fit this work, only The Last Tycoon. Researchers may view The Love of the Last Tycoon: A Western as the correct title, but from the viewpoint of an ordinary reader, and from my perspective as a novelist, I can’t say it’s a great title. I can imagine (if Fitzgerald really did bring up The Love of the Last Tycoon: A Western as his leading candidate) Maxwell Perkins objecting, since it sounds somewhat like a B-class Hollywood film title. And in the end—as I picture it—he would settle on The Last Tycoon. The same holds true of The Great Gatsby, but Fitzgerald often agonized over titles until the very last minute.

    I used the Wilson edition for my translation of the novel into Japanese because, first of all, it reads well. The Love of the Last Tycoon: A Western that Bruccoli edited may be justified on archival and scholarly grounds, but having ordinary readers read that edition for enjoyment may be asking too much. By contrast, in the Wilson edition, while a bit forced and inaccurate in places, one feels the warm affection that Fitzgerald’s old friend had for him, as well as the personal and literary enthusiasm Wilson felt, the desire to shape this outstanding novel so that more people would read it and recognize its real worth. To me that is more important than whether it’s academically pure or not. And, needless to say, Edmund Wilson was also a man of letters with an outstanding aesthetic sense, and I don’t think he was very off track.

    There are a few scandals involving heavy editing of novels. The most well-known case is that of Thomas Wolfe, whose works were very well received in the 1930s and ’40s, though in later years when it was revealed that his editor, Maxwell Perkins, had taken what was a huge pile of unorganized, crumpled-up manuscript pages and skillfully brought them together as a coherent novel, Wolfe’s literary reputation plummeted. When you think of the endless struggle and efforts the very serious Perkins went through, I feel sort of sorry for him. But this was a problem with Wolfe’s inherent laxness and messiness, and the ultimate responsibility of course lies with the author himself. Poor Fitzgerald’s case is quite different, since he was in the middle of composing the work and unwillingly left it unfinished. To be fair, as an editor and as an old friend, Edmund Wilson did an outstanding, conscientious job, and those who use academic correctness as a basis on which to condemn him are, I think, being a little ungenerous.

    At Charles Scribner’s Sons, Fitzgerald’s longtime editor, Maxwell Perkins, had the idea of getting another author to complete the novel. Candidates included John O’Hara and Budd Schulberg. After both of them turned him down flat (both claiming they could never write in Fitzgerald’s stead), Perkins had the notion of asking Hemingway for assistance. But Fitzgerald’s wife Zelda was dead-set against it, and the idea was soon abandoned. Finally, Perkins decided to have Edmund Wilson edit it and publish it unfinished. Fitzgerald’s popularity was already on the decline, and a half-finished novel like this couldn’t be expected to sell, but Perkins’s thought was that even a small profit would help Fitzgerald’s widow and daughter. At the time of his death, Fitzgerald had a $7,000 debt (advance) with Scribners.

    The Last Tycoon, with the subtitle of An Unfinished Novel, was published in 1941, the year after the author’s death. The first edition printing was less than five thousand copies, but against all expectations the book saw steady sales, with new printings coming out regularly. And many critics and writers liked the novel and thought highly of it (the sole negative reaction coming from his former friend Ernest Hemingway) and lamented his untimely passing. And these voices in praise of him served as a springboard, for after the war Fitzgerald’s reputation slowly rose.

    There is no doubt that MGM film producer Irving Thalberg was the model for the novel’s protagonist, Monroe Stahr. Naturally as a novelist Fitzgerald fleshed out this depiction of the model, yet it is clear that the real-life Thalberg left a deep impression on him and was one of the motivating factors that propelled him to write the novel. And the model for Pat Brady, the villain in opposition to Stahr, was the cofounder of MGM, Louis B. Mayer. Fitzgerald’s biographer Andrew Turnbull writes the following:

    Thalberg had dazzled Fitzgerald with peculiar charm, his extraordinary good looks, his bountiful success, the tragic end of his great adventure. Fitzgerald conceded it was Thalberg who inspired the best part of the character of Monroe Stahr—though I have put in some things drawn from other men and inevitably much of myself. (Andrew Turnbull, Scott Fitzgerald)

    Thalberg was born in Brooklyn, the son of a Jewish importer of lace, and was small of stature and frail-looking. Before Thalberg turned twenty, the president of Universal Pictures, Carl Laemmle, had singled him out for his talent and quickly promoted him to a high position in the studio, where he became known as the Boy Wonder. His somewhat dreamy idealism, his astonishing perfectionism (after one take he’d immediately call for another), and his untiring passion and devotion gave him a charisma that singled him out in the motion picture industry, where he became a legend. Louis B. Mayer, however, envied his success. Discord between the two surfaced, Thalberg was forced to resign and was subsequently treated coldly, and he died in 1936 at the young age of thirty-seven. Incidentally, Thalberg married the beautiful actress Norma Shearer, who (unlike the character Minna Davis in the novel), avoided a premature death and lived until 1983.

    In the prewar era, when Jewish people were still severely discriminated against, writing a novel spotlighting a Jewish hero—especially by a writer of Irish extraction (and a Catholic) like Fitzgerald—was almost unprecedented. Jay Gatsby, the hero of The Great Gatsby, was from a so-called poor white midwestern farming family, and in almost the same sense Monroe Stahr, born into a poor Jewish family in the Bronx, is a hero who clawed his way up from nearly the bottom of American society. With nothing but their talents, both quickly climbed the ladder of success. They had a clear-cut dream and ambition, and with that motivating them they went straight to the top. At a certain point those dreams and ambitions attached themselves to a woman, and the intensity of that attachment brought about a decisive downfall. Fitzgerald’s gaze as he watched this rise and fall was both gentle and dispassionate.

    In that sense, Monroe Stahr was a West Coast version of Jay Gatsby, but as Edmund Wilson pointed out in his introduction, Stahr was not the legendary sort of figure that Gatsby was, seemingly descending from nowhere into the Long Island scene of luxury and carousing. Instead, Stahr was an astute young businessman who carved out his own path in the newly created film industry. And Hollywood was supported by many ambitious Jewish people. Because it was a new industry, neither fish nor fowl at this point, there was yet room for Jewish people (who in other industries might be regarded as outsiders) to make their mark. Without any prejudice, Fitzgerald vividly grasped the personal magnetism of Monroe Stahr—and Irving Thalberg—as they swept all before them in the somewhat wild atmosphere of the early days of film. Their success and distinction was dazzling, their downfall totally sad and beautiful.

    In a letter to his daughter, Scottie, Fitzgerald wrote, Life is essentially a cheat and its conditions are those of defeat; the redeeming things are not happiness and pleasure but the deeper satisfactions that come out of struggle.

    This very well might sum up Fitzgerald’s literature, as well as his actual life.

    If I may be allowed a personal comment, when I reread this novel in order to translate it, I discovered a book that was even more heartfelt, even more profound than I had previously thought. As I translated each line into Japanese, I found myself admiring, all over again, the maturity and power of Fitzgerald’s writing.

    February 2022

    (Translated by Philip Gabriel)

    TRANSLATOR’S NOTE: This essay was originally written as an afterword to Mr. Murakami’s translation, into Japanese, of The Last Tycoon. Mr. Murakami has also translated The Great Gatsby and five collections of shorter pieces by F. Scott Fitzgerald.

    Title page of the first edition of The Last Tycoon, published October 27, 1941, less than a year after F. Scott Fitzgerald’s death in Hollywood at the age of forty-four.

    CHAPTER I

    THOUGH I HAVEN’T ever been on the screen I was brought up in pictures. Rudolph Valentino came to my fifth birthday party—or so I was told. I put this down only to indicate that even before the age of reason I was in a position to watch the wheels go round.

    I was going to write my memoirs once, The Producer’s Daughter, but at eighteen

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