The Last Tycoon

Publication history
The novel was unfinished and in rough form at the time of Fitzgerald's death at age 44. The notes for the novel were initially collected and edited by the literary critic Edmund Wilson, who was a close friend of Fitzgerald, and the unfinished novel was published in 1941 as The Last Tycoon, though there is now critical agreement that Fitzgerald intended The Love of the Last Tycoon to be the book's title.[citation needed] It was not until the 1993 publication, as part of the Cambridge edition of the Works of F Scott Fitzgerald, edited by Matthew J. Bruccoli, that the work first appeared as The Love of the Last Tycoon. The extant seventeen chapters of the thirty-one planned chapters were reassembled in 1993 by Bruccoli according to the author's notes.
Main characters
Monroe Stahr, Hollywood producer
Cecelia Brady, sometimes narrator, daughter of a producer
Pat Brady - Cecelia’s father and Stahr’s associate
Kathleen Moore - Stahr's love interest
Characters Discussed
Monroe Stahr, a brilliant, young film producer, as much interested in the artistic value of motion pictures as in making money. Having lost his wife whom he had loved deeply, he now courts death through overwork. He is extremely interested in the welfare of his employees, although he is not always appreciated by them. His short but passionate affair with Kathleen seems to be at the center of this unfinished novel.
The Last Tycoon was designed as a compact work, like The Great Gatsby (1925), with a narrator to ratify the experiences of a romantic figure. Following his usual pattern, Fitzgerald based Stahr's dead wife on Zelda, Kathleen Moore (Stahr's last love) on Sheilah Graham, and Brady, Stahr's partner, on Louis B. Mayer, whose daughter Cecilia provides the narrative focus. As Fitzgerald explained, "I hoped to get the verisimilitude of a first person narrative, combined with Godlike knowledge of all events that happened to my characters.