The Love of the Last Tycoon: A Western

by F. Scott Fitzgerald

Paper Book, 1994

Status

Available

Genres

Collection

David & Joyce Brewster Collection

Publication

New York : Scribner Paperback Fiction, 1994.

Description

Even in its incomplete form The Love of The Last Tycoon has achieved a reputation as the best novel about Hollywood. When F. Scott Fitzgerald died in 1940 he had written seventeen of thirty projected episodes. In 1941 the 'unfinished novel' was published in a text for general readers by Edmund Wilson under the title The Last Tycoon. For more than fifty years this edition, which is not true to the original work in progress, has been the only one available. This critical edition of The Love of The Last Tycoon, first published in 1994, utilises Fitzgerald's manuscript drafts, revised typescipts, and working notes to establish the first authoritative text of the work. The volume includes a detailed history of the gestation, composition, and publication of the novel; full textual apparatus with editorial notes; fascimiles of the drafts; and explanatory notes on topical allusions and historical references for contemporary readers. The reconstruction of Fitzgerald's plan for the thirteen unwritten episodes is particularly useful. F. Scott Fitzgerald's incomplete masterpiece is restored its 1940 state, and thus made fully accessible to a cross-section of readers.… (more)

Media reviews

San Francisco Chronicle

"A new, fascinating perspective on Fitzgerald's work, and the novel writing process in general."

User reviews

LibraryThing member KatieANYC

Unfinished and clearly still working towards where it would ultimately land, but still incredibly crisp and evocative.

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LibraryThing member HadriantheBlind

The author's last book, and a very incomplete one at that. One can see some fragments of the genius that wrote Gatsby, but there isn't very much left here to admire. Fame destroys.

LibraryThing member jonfaith

I read this book just after moving. It helped conceal my own inchoate sense of things. It bothered me, kidding myself, I thought about what the novel might had been. That wasn't the issue, then.

LibraryThing member skavlanj

There doesn't really seem to be a point to writing a review of the working draft of an unfinished novel. While it has a plot, there is no way of knowing how closely it hews to what the final story would have been. It is also apparent that this is a working draft; many of the Episodes are more

sketch than scene and the transitions are often less than smooth. There's also the abrupt end. Fitzgerald's appended notes are interesting but don't provide a clear picture of what the final novel would have been.

If only Fitzgerald had lived to finish this book. The voice is more mature than his early work, and the topic more along the lines of Tender is the Night than even The Great Gatsby. Worth reading as a glimpse into an artist at work.

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