The Last Tycoon

As perfectly tragic as one of his Jazz Age characters, Fitzgerald drank himself to death before finishing this novel which in my opinion, could have been his best. Like Gatsby, Monroe Stahr is an eloquent, rich, and isolated character, pining for a mysterious woman. He is a hugely successful movie mogul in the golden age of Hollywood, and Fitzgerald’s contempt for the studio system’s treatment of writers is here on full satirical display. The sparse prose sparkles with diamond-like harshness and clarity as the doomed love affair plays out. I’m sure it's his least known novel since it is technically… show more.

I came to this novel late, after friends adapted it into a TV series. My regret is I did not read it sooner. Fitzgerald often serves as the cautionary example of how Hollywood destroys true literary talent. But none of that is apparent in this uncompleted but extraordinary novel. Instead, Fitzgerald created a limerently admiring, page-turning story about a powerful studio executive’s own limerent pursuit of a mysterious woman, told to us by a college girl who herself is in love with the executive. The description of life and work in Hollywood is comprehensively accurate with one marvelous exception: no… show more.

This is not only a great novel by a great writer, but its unvarnished look at Hollywood, makes it, to me, one of the best show business novels of all time. It’s a book that made me want to be a writer and I learned so much from it about the economy of words. The other aspect about it that appeals to me is the fact that the novel’s main character, studio chief Monroe Stahr, is based on the real-life MGM studio executive Irving Thalberg, who produced A Night at the Opera, which starred my grandfather, Groucho Marx, and… show more.

F. Scott Fitzgerald was hired twice to work for Hollywood studios during the 1920s and 1930s. Not much came of his screenwriting, but Tinseltown gave the novelist something else: a glamorous industry to write about. Fitzgerald died having only written half of The Last Tycoon, but, in those 150 pages, we observe Hollywood through the eyes of Cecelia Brady, the student daughter of a studio chief. (‘At worst I accepted Hollywood with the resignation of a ghost assigned to a haunted house,’ she writes. ‘I knew what you were supposed to think about it but I was obstinately unhorrified.’)… show more.