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*With a new introduction by bestselling and iconic novelist Haruki Murakami*
This edition of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s final unfinished novel is now restored to the original 1941 text, with updates by Fitzgerald scholar James L. W. West III.
When F. Scott Fitzgerald died in 1940, he left behind an unfinished draft of this poignant novel, inspired by his own experience working in Hollywood as a screenwriter. Literary critic Edmund Wilson edited Fitzgerald’s notes and material to publish this text of The Last Tycoon in 1941. Now, this edition restores Wilson’s editorial work and includes an introduction from celebrated author Haruki Murakami.
Set in Hollywood in the 1930s, The Last Tycoon tells the tragic story of a young film producer named Monroe Stahr. Exploring themes of ambition, power, and corruption, The Last Tycoon depicts Stahr’s struggle to balance his personal life and professional goals with the challenges of running a successful movie studio. Based on the career of real-life producer Irving Thalberg, the head of MGM who was known as Hollywood’s “boy wonder”, The Last Tycoon is a sharply observed and bittersweet exposé of the glittering excess of the Hollywood film industry in its prime.
F. Scott Fitzgerald
Among the “Lost Generation” of writers that came of age during the Roaring Twenties, the work of F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896–1940) epitomized “The Jazz Age”: a period of declining traditional values, prohibition and speakeasies, and great artistic leaps. Fitzgerald’s first novel, This Side of Paradise, was a financial success, but subsequent ones, including his masterpiece, The Great Gatsby, sold poorly. In need of money, he turned to writing commercial short stories and Hollywood scripts, while his lifelong alcoholism destroyed his health and led to an early death. The 1945 reissue of The Great Gatsby spurred a wide resurgence of interest, and Fitzgerald is now considered one of the greatest American writers of the twentieth century.
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