Get the latest tech news

Scott Fitzgerald's Last Act

The author’s final, unfinished novel fused intimations of American decline with an encroaching sense of his own mortality.

The racial angle shall scarcely be touched on at all.” In Hollywood, Fitzgerald had come to know and admire Jews—notably Irving Thalberg, the “boy wonder” producer of MGM who became his model for Monroe Stahr (“he is one of the half dozen men I have known who were built on the grand scale”). He spoke derisively of the ideologically driven American novels of the period, including Richard Wright’s celebrated Native Son(1940), which he called “a well-written penny dreadful.” As for Tycoon, he told Littauer, “this is a novel—not even faintly of the propaganda type.” Fitzgerald wrote in his notes for Tycoon of wanting to “do some very strong, quiet writing.” In writing at less than his highest pitch, he seems to be leaving space for some other form of understanding, for whatever fresh knowledge becomes available to a man in midlife, for whom the beauty of the world is both more muted and more poignant.

Get the Android app