Book Review: The Last Tycoon, by F. Scott Fitzgerald (1941)

1976 paperback edition of The Last Tycoon, by F. Scott Fitzgerald, originally published in 1941. Photo taken by Mark C. Taylor on my Fitzgerald bookshelf, of course.

F. Scott Fitzgerald, 1937. Photo by Carl Van Vechten.

How do you review an unfinished novel? Do you judge it by what exists on paper, or do you judge the possibilities behind it? Inevitably, I suppose we end up doing both. I thought F. Scott Fitzgerald’s unfinished novel The Last Tycoon was good, but I disagree with those who thought it would have been the best thing he’d ever written had he been able to complete it. Because Fitzgerald was such a meticulous editor, The Last Tycoon certainly would have improved had he lived to finish it. My affection for Fitzgerald and my high regard for his talent make me wish that he had lived longer and finished The Last Tycoon, and that the novel would have returned him to the high literary standing that he deserved. 

F. Scott Fitzgerald died on December 21, 1940, at the age of 44. Fitzgerald feared that he was a forgotten writer, and he had good reason to worry that his reputation would languish in obscurity. He hadn’t published a book in five years, his masterpiece The Great Gatsby had been pulled from the Modern Library series because of poor sales, and while he had once written regularly for The Saturday Evening Post, one of the most popular magazines in America, commanding $4,000 per story, his short stories now only appeared in Esquire, a fledgling magazine that was just seven years old, and that paid him $250 per story. At the age of 44, Fitzgerald was living the life of a struggling writer. This was new to him because he had achieved success at such a young age, seeing his first novel published at the age of 23. 

In 1940, Fitzgerald was seen as a relic of the Jazz Age, a phrase that Fitzgerald himself coined, and his books weren’t selling. The last royalty statement of his life, dated August 1, 1940, was for the sum of $13.13. (Some Sort of Epic Grandeur, by Matthew J. Bruccoli, p.486) After Fitzgerald’s death, The New York Times obituary said of him, “Roughly, his own career began and ended with the 1920’s.” Ouch. 

In the year before his death, Fitzgerald had been hard at work on a novel about Hollywood. The Last Tycoon focuses on Monroe Stahr, a movie producer modeled after Irving Thalberg, a producer and executive at MGM. Thalberg famously didn’t take screen credit on his movies, saying that “credit you give yourself isn’t worth having.” Due to a congenital heart disease, Thalberg knew he would be lucky to live to thirty. He rose to be head of production at MGM by the age of 26. Thalberg died at the age of 37 in 1936.

The Last Tycoon focuses on the struggle between Stahr and Pat Brady, another executive at the studio. The conflict between Stahr and Brady was based on the real-life differences between Irving Thalberg and Louis B. Mayer at MGM. Fitzgerald biographer Andrew Turnbull wrote that the conflict between Stahr and Brady exemplified the battles of “art versus money, quality versus quantity, the individualist versus the industrialist.” (Scott Fitzgerald, p.306) This fits in with Fitzgerald’s own romanticism—he saw Stahr as the last relic of a bygone age, and Brady as the unromantic technocratic bean-counter who is only interested in the bottom line. Guess which character Fitzgerald identified with more. 

The novel switches between first person and third person narration. The first person narrator is Cecilia Brady, the college-age daughter of Pat Brady. Cecilia has a crush on Stahr and finds him to be a fascinating person. In my opinion, the first person sections are much stronger than the third person sections. I heard Fitzgerald’s voice in Cecilia’s sections, and in the other sections I couldn’t—they just didn’t sound like Fitzgerald to me. 

Perhaps the reason that some of the book didn’t sound like Fitzgerald to me is that none of what was published as The Last Tycoon was actually finished in Fitzgerald’s eyes. He was a painstaking editor of his own writing, even making changes to The Great Gatsby when the book was in galleys. Fitzgerald would no doubt be chagrined if he knew that people are reading a piece of his fiction that he hadn’t finished and polished for publication. 

After Fitzgerald’s death, his editor Maxwell Perkins asked John O’Hara and Budd Schulberg to complete the novel. They both turned him down. Perkins then thought of asking Ernest Hemingway, but Zelda Fitzgerald smartly vetoed that idea. In January 1941, Perkins wrote to Zelda: “I don’t think anybody ought to attempt to write an ending, or even could do it.” (Some Sort of Epic Grandeur, p.489) Perkins was right—it would have been folly for another writer to attempt to finish Fitzgerald’s novel.

Fitzgerald’s fellow Princetonian Edmund Wilson edited the 1941 edition of The Last Tycoon. Wilson also included many pages of Fitzgerald’s notes for the novel. One of them has become one of Fitzgerald’s most quoted aphorisms: “There are no second acts in American lives.” (p.212) Unfortunately, Fitzgerald did not live to see his own second act, which was the remarkable posthumous reevaluation of his work, and his entry into the highest rank of American authors.