The Last Tycoon and Max Eastman: Fitzgerald's Complete Political Primer

Abstract

Unfortunately for American letters, when F. Scott Fitzgerald died he left behind a brilliant and extensive but critically problematical set of fragments of a Hollywood novel, tentatively entitled Stahr a Romance or The Love of the Last Tycoon A Western, but published as The Last Tycoon. Although the published edition has been available for fortyodd years, the need to decipher its unfinished design persists. The plot is cut off; the disorderly notes provide contradictions and minimal help in interpretation; the extant texts exist in a number of states, none final; and Edmund Wilson's edition raises grave doubts. Nevertheless, Tycoon is a most ambitiously planned novel, conceived in the moral and metaphorical amplitude of Fitzgerald's full artistic maturity, assimilating at least as absolutely as elsewhere in the canon his cultural perceptions and ambiguities regarding the quality of American civilization.